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Mansfield Sentimentality (changes)

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Question

Ever since Virginia Woolf�s cutting remark that when she met Katherine Mansfield, the latter, apparently wearing an excess of perfume, �stank stank like a civet cat that had taken to street-walking� street-walking to Wyndham Lewis� Lewis dismissal of her as a mere �Mag.- Mag.- writer,� writer, Mansfield has been accused of cheap sentimentality, a glib, over-charged romanticism that embraces the trivial and vulgar just as easily as it does the profound and beautiful. Such accusers often point to her body of harder-edged stories as the more accomplished and truly modernist ones. Other than marginalizing the saccharine side of Mansfield by claiming that her satirical stories represent her �real� real style, perhaps we can find another way to explain this strange, neglected side of Mansfield. What relationship does the grim view given by her tales of murder, exploitation, and abandonment have to the cozy, touching stories of optimism, love, and family life? What do her fellow modernists stand to gain from policing Mansfield and her cheapness, and what does this anxiety say about modernism?

Outline

• Intro: Mansfield’s ambivalent position
  • the whole Chekhov scandal
  • Woolf and sexuality thing
  • N Z background
  • seen as backbiting, insincere, and close-lipped
• Start with cynical stories b/c that’s what her critics have done in response
  • Begin with Je ne parle pas, her most famous in the cynical vein
  • Go to the murder ones, using “The Woman at the Store” to exemplify
  • Comparing with stories from In a German Pension, for example Sister of the Baroness, “�How I should adore to kiss you. But you know I am suffering from a nasal catarrh, and I dare not give it to you.�”
    • and stories in this collection actually show cynicism about the typical methods modernists use to bypass, overcome, engage with modernity: in “The Advanced Lady” and “The Modern Soul” where aestheticism and feminism are seen as silly, have no power against realities of say, “Frau Brechenmacher Goes to a Wedding” and “At Lehmann’s” which shows a diff milieu to worry about
      • and even love: poor Lawrence, what would he say to the woman in “The Swing of the Pendulum,” whose title implies she really might have gone into prostitution like she contemplated, to support her while she tries to make reputation as a writer: �I was not in love. I needed someone to look after me and keep me until my work began to sell and he kept bothers with other men away�. I wasn�t born for poverty � I only flower among really jolly people.�
      • just as in “Psychology” you see two smart people avoiding the issue of sex and love by talking about psychoanalysis as a field of inquiry
    • comedy is the frustration of sentimentality
  • The working class story: “Pictures” and “The Life of Ma Parker” and “The Tiredness of Rosabel”
    • where sentimentality is critique
    • �Can you aviate � high-dive drive a car buckjump � shoot?� from a film studio�s questionnaire
    • and she goes into an ABC teashop
    • “if it’s all the same with you, I’ll go with you” she says which means she’s yielding to her inability to have a job, by becoming a prostitute
• Transition story, Ol Underwood
• The cutesy stories
  • “An Ideal Family”
  • “Sun and Moon”
  • “A Dill Pickle,” two former lovers meet and it’s obvious he’s moved upward socially and she’s moved downwards, partially as a result of their breakup. However he tries to ignore it and therefore chatters on and one about the newest “Mind Philosophy” imported from Russia
  • “Something Childish but Very Natural”
    • sentimentality is a conscious mood, an awareness of what cannot be
  • “Mr. and Mrs. Dove”
• A comparison
  • The Canary versus The Fly
  • Blakean, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience
  • Canary and fly are both dead animals that symbolize attitudes towards trauma (canary: the woman’s lonely life; fly: the boss’ son, dead from WWI)
• Reconsider Je ne parle pas and go over its possible sentimentality
  • Artist thematics
• Let’s see what this purchases us with some of her famous stories: sentimentality is a type of critique, which charts the loss of innocence as it happens, not distanced from it
  • Garden Party
    • Laura being accused of sentimentality by her family means that bourgeois are critiqued for their lack of such
  • Miss Brill
    • The treatment of her little fox and its relation to her own dawning self-awareness of being old and obsolete… her own relation is nostalgic and sentimental cuz it’s all she has
  • Bliss
    • where Bertha is seen as within an avant-garde milieu: sentimentality is so close to you
    • compare to earlier “At Lehmann’s” where a working class waitress has sexual awakening on the job but can hear the painful screaming of her boss’ wife in labor upstairs the whole time
    • Compare Bertha’s �Why Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?� fiddle? which will end up in a sexual awakening that doesn’t stop at worry about infidelity, with the poet Eddie Warren’s (which is Aldous Huxley) �I I saw myselfdriving through Eternity in a timeless taxi!� taxi! (pale poet Eddie Warren)
  • Prelude
  • Psychology
    • significance of simplicity shows you the only thing you can actually get: food
• End with Man Without a Temperament where “sentimentality” is an imagined alternative to modernity: it is a measured, tiny existence that is carefully controlled; where the small things mean everything
  • Tempered by what Mansfield cannot have – health, sense of belonging and home, mutually supportive relash w/Murry – her own distance from modernism, even modernism is seen from a film of sentimentality
  • Compare to “The Escape:” Cigarette smoke, loss of parasol done purposefully? done by the man as petty revenge b/c his life is run by her sickness
• Conclusion
  • Modernism as machismo, control, masculinity
    • find that stuff about Pound’s masculinity from Janet’s book

Theses

• Katherine enacts the ups and downs of modernity, the manic depression of hopes and cynicism
  • She is not one or the other type of reaction to modernity, but instead both of them (cf Marshall Berman)
• The only way she can critique modernity is by showing the shallowness of what acceptance might mean, by investigating it and then implicitly rejecting it
  • Man Without a Temperament is Katherine’s rewrite of her life, an alternate life, which creates nostalgia for a life she doesn’t have: but in this history she still gets to critique it, therefore critiquing her own need for the sentiment
    • She is however willing to call a spade a spade: in recognizing her own personal systems of negotiation to be fictions and for them to be analogous to the escapism that the bourgeois engage in
• Sure, she is a heavily autobiographical life, but in doing so she shows the limits of imagination: what will daydreams do and fix? and what won’t they fix?
• She is threatening the high/low divide, and she’s also questioning the privilege of culture as a re-imagination of modernity. No, in fact, we all engage in it, and it’s quite limited in its purview.
  • Their views are just as sentimental as hers (like machismo of a Hemingway or a Pound or a Lewis or a Hulme) b/c all imaginative relations to modernity are hollow and temporary.
  • She positions high cultural work as analogous to the daydreams of the working class and the bourgeoisie.
• The problem with Mansfield’s oeuvre is not that it’s fragmented and schizophrenic, but that it’s completely unified despite the superficial mismatch.
• Mansfield uses sentimentality to reveal the lack of options the working class has to change their relation to modernity. Through the use of retrospective or prospective reverie, Mansfield reveals the severely limited options the working class has to articulate their problems, especially the women. So limited in fact that it needs an author to enunciate.
• Modernists come in here b/c their own tactics of negotiating with modernity (feminism, psychology, snobbery/coterie, “free love” or open sexuality, Blavatsky “open mind”) are just as useless.

How could she be called sentimental?

• Children and “simpler” consciousnesses are represented simply and with sympathy; no judgment by the narrator
• Innocent pleasures: food, dress
  • Food as the gateway drug to sex
  • “the absorbed inward look that only comes from whipped cream”
  • Psychology: �the “the kind of cake that might have been mentioned in the Book of Genesis. Genesis.” �And And God said �Let “Let there be cake.� cake. And so it was.�� was.”
  • Food as the craving for sweetness: Who the heck else would talk about cake in this way: �a “a tray of pastries�row pastries, row upon row of little freaks, little inspirations, little melting dreams� dreams” (93)? or the �absorbed “absorbed inward look that only comes from eating whipped cream� cream” (found in �The “The Garden Party�)? Party”)?
    • Food: like in �Psychology� “Psychology” and �The “The Garden Party,� Party,” we find the character�s character’s sweet tooth as a way to relate to them sympathetically (she has a cup of hot chocolate, a ginger ice, three pastries, and a cherry tartlet, despite �not “not being hungry� hungry” and asking for them as if her desire were a careless afterthought) � and it shows she�s she’s still like her little brother
  • The Garden Party: the tray of cream puffs on which is added “mountains” of powdered sugar that is so bulky it keeps falling off, shedding everywhere…and indeed every commodity is huge (the band is big, the marquee is big, Laura’s new hat is absurdly big), and when they offer the family of the dead man the food left from the party, they are giving him the excess: symbolically giving him back the “Surplus value” that their class took from their. But it’s just too late.
    • Try to get this in as a part of my point that the sentimental charge is often a lack of recognition that she talks about class, and that there are fewer opportunities for critique allowed for the working class
• Presentation of hopeful attitudes; sympathy of narrator for such attitudes
• People normally don’t write about happiness or euphoria (maybe moments of epiphany but that’s diff from sheer happiness)
• Romantic streaks (power of imagination, childhood)
• Interpersonal relations are sometimes fetishized w/nicknames, private jokes
• Mansfield’s entire oeuvre is thus a double register of modernity, documenting both a serious side, with its tortured and affectively “deep” artistis and bohemians (many based on real-life modernists, such as Huxley and Eliot) failing to find truth, beauty, and untainted love; and an unserious side, with its affectively “shallow” bourgeois families and lower-class workers enjoying and believing in whatever specious or limited sense of happiness they can cultivate.