Andrew's Wiki
Mansfield Outline (changes)

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• Intro: On Mansfield
  • Always tenuous position
  • Bloomsbury
    • Vicious attacks behind her back
    • In love with her “playlets” her performances on the guitar and her gift for mimicry and impersonation
  • Sexuality: she enacted that, and it scared some supposedly “Advanced” people
  • colonial, seen as low born
  • JMM’s paeans after her death not well-received
  • seen as close-lipped, back-stabbing, masklike insincere
  • Woolf: “after so very nearly the same thing” and the only writer she wants to talk shop with and the only one she’s jealous of…despite the cat comment
  • Lawrence: his letter saying literally, “I hope you die,” but then also admitting, “we are unthinkably alike.”
• What they all say is that she was at once sentimental and cynical.
• The Sentimental Stories
  • Bliss (Woolf)
    • Sympathetic representation of simple euphoria
    • Sexual awakening survives a bump in the road
    • The quick climax
    • The vicious, one sided, unsubtle parodies
    • The obvious, overloaded symbolism
    • Similar to “Her First Ball,” “The Young Girl,” “Sun and Moon,” where a rather insignificant, ordinary person without any extraordinary gift or position in life is awarded considerable empathy and attention, and only in order to talk about relatively “sentimental” topics like love, fashion, innocence, and adolescence. Small domestic crises are given a whole artistic treatment, elevated to the heroic.
  • Lewis: the “Mag.-writer” when editor of the Sphere offered her six stories at 10 guineas apiece. They were rushed, very Fitzgerald like, and she admits that “I didn’t get at the deepest truth.”
    • her own harshest critic
• The Hard Stories
  • And indeed she recognizes her own polarity as also a weakness: “Nothing of any worth can come from a disunited being. I am a sham.”
  • Yet the hard stories were what propelled her into the British avant-garde scene
  • In a German Pension
    • ridicules modern strategies of meaning making, especially those resorted to by her fellow writers
    • “The Advanced Lady” mocks feminism
    • “A Modern Soul” mocks the exaggeration of “modernity” and novelty
    • Just as other stories like “A Dill Pickle” and “Psychology” mock psychology, theosophy, and other pop topics among the progressive as ways to avoid true personal intercourse and necessary exploration, and just as “Je ne parle pas francais” reveals the avant-garde art scene to be a narcissistic, hypocritical hotbed of prostitution and histrionics of the self
  • Murder Stories
    • Woman at the Store: loneliness of the colonial bushland is not romanticized but revealed as the source of disregard for human life. Failed hospitality for two lighthearted daytrippers in the bush ends in recognition that this woman has killed her husband and abuses her child.
    • Millie: cheap sentimentalism is turned upside down: wanton violence is the inversion of the wanton bliss of Bertha Young; violence is explained through an atavistic, almost primitivist framework, showing it to be one of her more “sentimental” work though it was praised by the editors and readership of the New Age
    • Ole Underwood: murder is actually seen to arise from difficulties in personal interaction, a result of his suffering from failures to connect (crushing the flowers, getting kicked out of the bar, getting rejected from a group of card-players). She is sympathetic, and the way she manages to bring Ole Underwood towards and away from the reader’s sympathy shows her at her best.
• Class: the mixture
  • Some of her truly “hard” stories, the cynical ones that posit a nihilist view on modernization, are also her most sentimental: the suffering of the lower classes is seen through Katherine exposing their subjectivities as sentimental. Their sentimentalizing of their lives through fantasies is revealed as the poor substitute for their lack of political power. Everyday loneliness is presented, and everyday folks with their sentimentality in tact.
  • “The Tiredness of Rosabel”
    • A shopgirl at the end of the day judgmentally rejects the mode of sentimental literature like the girl next to on the omnibus (tattered cheap serialized novel)
    • But she immediate indulges in reverie, using the tropes of the literature she rejects to imagine herself a new life.
    • And she goes to bed: anticlimax shows lack of choices
  • “Pictures”
    • Sees where fantasies get you: becoming a movie star, imagining herself as “my Lady,” as her landlady caustically calls her…
    • An aging unattractive woman trying to become a film star, succumbs to prostitution while trying to take a rest in a sleazy cafe
    • She tries to take comfort in the respectable, lower middle class ABC teashop, but is driven out b/c she doesn’t belong, ie everyone else is young and chatting about romance, and it depresses her.
    • “Can you aviate, high dive, drive a car, buckjump, shoot?” Areas for advancement secured by people already within the upper class of modernity
  • “The Life of Ma Parker”
    • Engages in reveries about her own life story, constantly conjuring up new memories
    • It’s the only thing she has: her loved ones have been taken from her one by one; she cannot communicate with her landlord; and she even has no place to go, as the story ends by telling us. And it begins to rain.
  • “Miss Brill”
    • too engages in a sentimental relationship with her little fox capelet and her weekly almond cake, fetishizing her daily existence into believing that she has a caring community around her each Sunday listening to the military band play.
    • But the ridicule by two people shows public arena as unsuccessful, and she gives up on her entire fantasy world
  • Two stories about the mixing of social classes reveal this same alternation of sentimentalism and cynicism being explored, “The Garden Party” and “The Doll House”
    • Kezia gets in trouble for wanting to share her new dollhouse, with its miniature working electric lamp, with her poor neighbors the Kelveys
      • Sentimentality, how the girls treat this commodity as a the most beautiful thing around and quickly begin to have fantasizes about the house and what would happen in it, at first can join the bourgeois and the proles, but snobbery shuts that off.
    • Laura has to recognize the hard truth about death and class identity when a workman dies in a cottage directly below their garden on the day of their garden party.
    • The fetishization of commodities in these stories (the dollhouse, Laura’s new hat, the cream puffs delivered by the chicest bakery in New Zealand, “that absorbed inward look that only comes from whipped cream”) shows one powerful connection between sentimentality and cynicism: where KM’s treatment of the the absurd overinvestment of affect into finite material objects in the midst of “larger” social crises and issues provides a cynical view about overcoming class identity.
• The Canary and the Fly
  • Both of them investigate the effects of trauma through the death of an animal; both come at the end of her life; both named symmetrically; but they are commonly interpreted as completely diff, one as sentimental and worthless, the other as sophisticated and a masterpiece
  • The Canary
    • Loneliness of lower middle class life, where a woman who “takes in lodgers” must rely on her canary to keep meaning in her life
    • She invests the canary with special attributes and qualities, posits a deep sympathy and astonishingly powerful powers of communication between herself and the bird, and in general creates a rich fantasy life around this bird that creates for her a world where she is special, the natural world is a kind of “personal God” that services her needs, and she has ideal relationships.
    • The canary’s death makes her realize that life has an indefinable sadness about it, but she can’t articulate it exactly, and Mansfield lets this character (for it’s a monologue) stumble in trying to convey this fact, the larger meaning of her grief for the bird.
  • The Fly
    • A father still grieving for the loss of his son six years ago in WWI exhibits a twisted sense of bravery and suffering in his relations with a fly.
    • The father is worried that, contra to his six years of constantly suffering, he might be getting over the death of his sun.
    • A fly landed in ink but manages to brush itself off. The boss is impressed and continues to subject the fly to more and more ink, letting it recover before loading more on.
      • Suffering is seen here as a manly activity of courage and bravery (which is why he suffers for his son still)
    • But then it goes overboard: he ends up killing the fly, and then he even forgets to grieve about his son.
      • Suggesting that the violence of WWI (and later, WWI) is due to a kind of machismo, a cult of bravery and courage that does not know when to stop.
      • Cycle of violence within a culture of bravery and courage, where the next round of violence helps you to forget the last one.
  • In these two stories, we see Katherine’s literary object to create a “Cry against corruption” in two very different ways: one by showing the lack of opportunities for the lonely and the poor; one by a critique of the cult of suffering and courage.
    • Though people treat them differently, they really perform the same types of operation. One in a “cynical” fashion, the other in a “sentimental” fashion, but the critique is the same.
• Conclusion:
  • She’s vicious and cynical towards her own milieu, both the upper, socially aspiring bourgeoisie of her childhood and the would-be rarified air of the London art scene, but sympathetic towards the lower classes and the disadvantaged.
    • Her wild swings from the irony and unsympathetic judgment that marks a certain strain of modernism (especially Lewis) to a mere miming that appears sentimental merely because of its lack of judgment. No wonder people think her insincere. It’s the “Cry against corruption” which doesn’t work the same way for each of the social classes and both genders (her travel stories, like “The Little Governess,” often show perils of women going about it alone)
    • Her talent for impersonation, where she can mimic the voice of anyone perfectly, which enables her innovative use of indirect discourse, can therefore look capricious, as she selectively chooses which characters to load irony on and which characters to leave unscathed. From the standpoint outside of morality (art is only art; which is against her social critique), it looks insincere.
  • So why does everyone get up in arms about it?
    • Could in part be a classism, where if you represent the cheap, dull and vulgar (these are Lewis’ words) sympathetically, then you too are cheap, dull and vulgar.
    • Inwardness is a tricky term about this time. People want to avoid looking like they’re just another sentimental literature, or care about insipid people, or promote the “democratic” ideal that everyone has spontaneous and authentic beings.
      • Katherine indifferently aims her capacities for sympathy and for critique at both the obscure and poor as well as the talented and the privileged.
  • Katherine caricatures the “Subjectivity” side of modernism both in the sense of eviscerating it (“Bliss,” “Je ne parle pas francais,” “Marriage a la Mode”) and in the sense of dramatizing it vividly (“Bliss,” (“Psychology,” “Psychology,” “The Canary,” “The Music Lesson”).
  • While modernists like Woolf and Lewis want to move away from any easy Romantic sentimentalism like that of pop culture, mass culture, which K was more comfy with