KATHERINE MANSFIELD:

AN AVANT-GARDE WRITER
 CHAPTER - I

KATHERINE MANSFIELD: AN AVANT-GARDE WRITER

A radical break with the past and concurrent search for new forms of

expression emerged in arts. Modernism is a literary and cultural international

movement which flourished in the first decades of the 20' century. It is not a term to

which a single meaning can be ascribed. It may be applied both to the content and to

the form of a work, or to either in isolation. It reflects a sense of cultural crisis which

was both exciting and disquieting, that it opened up a whole new vista of human

possibilities at the same time putting into question any previously accepted means of

grounding and evaluating new ideas. Modernism is marked by experimentation,

particularly manipulation of form, and by the realization that knowledge is not

absolute.

Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or

practice: More speciJically, the term describes both a set of cultural

tendencies and an array of associated cultural movements, originally

arisingpom wide-scale and far-reaching changes to western society in the

late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term encompasses the

activities and output of those who felt the "traditional" form of art,

architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily life

were becoming outdated in the new economic, social and political

conditions of an emerging, filly industrialized world (Pericles, L. 2000

38-39).
 Like other literary movements, it is not clearly stated when modem period

begins or ends. Modernism can be regarded as a 'time bound concept' that is

modernism started in 1890 and ended in about 1930, or a 'time less concept'. The

starting point of modernism is the crisis of belief that pervades twentieth century

western cultures; loss of faith, experience offiagmentation and disintegration, and

the shattering of cultural symbols and norms (Childs, P.2000 48). Moreover

modemism was a reaction to change industrialization, development of technology,

migration of people fiom country to cities, new psychological ideas, as well as the

attitude toward the Great War and the Second World War at the end of the nineteenth

and the beginning of the twentieth century.

The period between the 1890s and the First World War was a period of

transition. Writers are acutely aware of changes in society, particularly those relating

to science and technology, and to human consciousness. The certainties of the

Victorian era are lost, and the modern age loomed as a frightening, unknowable

future. The modernism encouraged the re-examination of every aspect of existence,

fiom commerce to philosophy, with the goal of finding that which was 'holding back'

progress, and replacing it with new ways of reaching the same end.

The word 'modem' -comes from the Latin "modo" which means 'current'.

This word is not only connected with modernism as such, but it has a wide range of

definitions because critics avoid providing one. Drabble, M. (2000 698) sees

Modernism as a literary movement or a collective term, that was given throughout

Europe, to movements, school in literature, art and music fiom the end of the

nineteenth century to the start of the Second world war.

 Although modernism is used to describe twentieth century writing, a modem

period in literature is believed to have begun in the sixteenth century and modem

English, even earlier, in the Middle Ages. At first, modernism was called the

"Avant-garde", and the term remained to describe movements which identify

themselves as attempting to over throw some aspect of tradition or the status quo

(Fred; O.,and Griselda, P. 1996).

The word 'Modernist' describes authors and a characteristic feature in the

literary movement. Unlike Romanticism, modernism was not a single movement but

consisted of a number of movements. Each of them depicted reality in a different way,

such as impressionism, post-impressionism, expressionism, cubism, symbolism,

imagism, vorticism, dadaism, futurism and surrealism. Its forbearers are Darwin,

Marx, Nietzche, and Freud. Further some critics believed that modemism was only

a collective term for authors who belong to the literary movement. 'Modernist' was

used in the sixteenth century to describe a modern person and later in the eighteenth

century it was associated with a follower of modem ways and supporter of modem

literature. Modernist writing is most particularly, for its experimentation, its

complexity, its formalism, and its attempt to create a 'tradition of new'. Twentieth

Century literature registers the impact of nineteenth century revolutions in science,

political economy and psychology, the emulative effect of educational reforms, the

changing position of women, and rising nationalist movements both at home and in

the colonies. .

Important intellectual precursors of modemism, in this sense, and thinkers

who had questioned the certainities that had supported traditional modes of social

organization, religion, and morality are Friedrich Nietzsehe, Karl Man, Sigmund

Freud, Charles Darwin in the context of science, psychology, philosophy and

linguistics. Modernism is mainly characterized by the word "uncertainty".
 By the end of the nineteenth century, religion was in decline for a number of

reasons. Science had in many ways dismantled the certainties of previous ages.

Darwinism had shaken people's faith in the Genesis or in a divine creator, and the

churches were ceasing to perform a therapeutic role in helping individuals to cope

with life's crisis. At the centre of this crisis were the new technologies of science, the

epistemology of logicalpositivism, and the relativism offunctionalist thought-in short,

major uspectsofhephilosophiwlperspectiva that Freud embodied (Childs,P. 2000 48).

Modernism is an overall socially progressive trend of thought that affirms the

power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the

aid of practical experimentation, scientificknowledge or technology:

In the twentieth century, the social processes that bring this maelstrom

into being, and keep it in a state ofperpetual becoming, have come to be

called 'modernization'. These world- historical process have nourished an

amazing variety of visions and ideas that aim to make men and women the

subjects as well as the objects of modernization, to give them the power to

change the world that is changing them, to make it their way through the

maelstrom and make it their own. Over the past century, these visions and

values have come to loosely grouped together under the name of

'modernism' (Berman, M.1988 16)

Malcom Bradbury and James Mc Farlone have shown how previous decades

of literary criticism devoted to cataloguing modemist aesthetic conventions had come

to distilled with an Anglo -American critical tradition. It identifies five key modernist

tendencies: the movement away !?om representational realism towards abstract and
autotelic art fonns; a high degree of aesthetic self-consciousness; an aesthetic of

radical innovation, fragmentation, and shock; the breaking of familiar formal and

linguistic conventions; and the use of paradox.

Like wise, in the much earlier 'A Glossary of literary terms', a well-known

American critic Abrarns, M.H.(2000 167-168)wrote:

The specijc features sign$ed by 'modernism ' vary with the user, but many

critics agree that it involves a deliberate and radical break with some of the

traditional bases both of western culture and of western art ... A prominent
feature of modernism is the phenomenon of an avant-garde... that is, a small,

self- conscious group of artists and authors who undertake, in Ezra Pound's

phrase, to "make it new ". By violating accepted conventions and decorums,

they undertake to create ever-new artistic forms and styles and to introduce

hitherto neglected and sometimes forbidden, subject matter.

Both definitions emphasize the centrality of a conscious break with past to all

variants of modernism. In similar fashion, J.A. Cuddon describes literary modernism

as 'a breaking away from established rules, traditions and conventions' which reveals

'fiesh ways of looking at man's position and function in the universe and many

experiments happened in form and style. It is particularly concerned with language

and how to use it and with writing itself. Modernist texts at the beginning of the

twenty first century, as all three definitions suggest, modernism in synonymous with

the rejection of the past and an embrace of aesthetic innovation, It is synonymous

with diverse movements in art, architecture and literature characterized by deliberate

breaks with classical and traditional forms or methods of expression.

 It is synonymous with the opening four decades of the twentieth century with

their emphasis on inter-disciplinary and diversity. These definitions discourage

readings of modernism inclined to dismiss it as an esoteric literary movement

produced by loosely affiliated iconoclasts. Subtle variations aside, in all instances

modernism emerges as a complex response across continents and disciplines to

a changing world.

As the twentieth century progressed, the drive to embrace the modem note

signaled in Pound's succinct call to "Make it New" embedded itself in ever

increasingly formalized definitions of modernism. Modernism mottoes were

deliberately revolutionary, 'a doing away with the failures of the past and a side

stepping of all those fallen pillars'. The writer Gertrude Stein urged artists to "kill the

nineteenth century dead". Indeed, modernism's revolutionary impulses continued to

be privileged in critical crisis decades after the publication of 'Make it New' in 1934.

The novel thrived in the early years of this century, and so did the idea of the

novel which, among the modernists, was turning into a very different creature.

According to the literary theories of Flaubert and Henry James, style and form were

everything, or almost everything, and subject matter was unimportant. The novel was

an autonomous aesthetic creation, not an imitation of life, on which the creator-the

novelist-should not intrude. Aesthetic considerations of this kind were the chief

concern of the greatest novelists of the period including Marcel Proust, James Joyce,

Joseph Conard, Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence.

'Bloomsbury', in the sense of an intellectual social circle, extended much

further. It represented the essence of the post-victorian, modernist culture, extending

firom literature and art to sex, family life and international relations. Bloomsbury in
this sense had a profound effect on Britain, although its. truly international. figures

were few, the most notable being the economist Keynes, J.M. (1883-1946) and the

novelist Virginia Woolf.

Virginia Woolf, whose life was punctuated by nervous breakdowns, was an

experimental novelist. Besides her own work, she was a stimulating commentator in

her luminously intelligent essays and in her feminist criticism, A Room of One's own,

1929. Her early novels, The Voyage Out (1915, but written earlier) and Night and Day

(1919) were relatively realistic. The interval between them was largely occupied with

Hogarth press, which published Katherine Mansfield and T.S. Eliot among others.

Virginia Woolf reputation as England's leading modernist author was

established in the 1920's by Jacob's Room (1922), based on the life and death of

a beloved brother; Mrs. Dalloway (1925), is a classic using the stream of

consciousness technique; To the Lighthouse (1 927), employing the same technique to

explore male-female conflict and based on her parents; and The Waves (1931), her

most boldly experimental (and difficult) novel, and considered by some critics as her

master piece. The eponymous Orlando (1928) is alternatively male and female

through four centuries. Something of a departure, it was her most successful novel

and dedicated to vita Sackville west, a woman of shared affinities. Her last novel

Between the Acts (1941) returns to the stream-of-consciousness techniques and

celebrates traditional English values in the shadow of war.

Poetry of the modern period, as one literary historian puts it, 'has not escaped

the atmosphere of controversy.' Few groups of poets have endured such censure as

the English 'Georgians' (1920s) seen as artificial and shallow. French symbolism

remained an important influence, especially in Germany, where it stimulated one of

the finest lyric poets of the century, Rilke, R.M. (1875-1926). In France surrealism,

a term coined by the 'evangelist of Modernism" Apollinaire, G. (1880-1918) aimed,

under the vigorous leadership of Breton, A. (1896-1966) to over turn all accepted

doctrine in poetry and the arts. Other influential movements included German

Expressionism and Italian Futurism. Surrealism ("Superrealism") was launched as

a concerted artistic movement in France by Andre Breton's manifesto on Surrealism

(1924). It was a successor to the brief movement known as Dadaism, which emerged

in 1916 out of disgust with the brutality and destructiveness of the First World War,

and set out, according to its Manifestos, to engender a negative art and literature that

would destroy the false values of modern bourgeois society, including its rationality

and the art and literature it had fostered. Among the experiments of Dadaism were, for

a time, artists, and poets such as Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Max

Emst.

The expressed aim of surrealism was a revolt against all restraints on free

creativity, including logical reason, standard morality, social and artistic conventions

and norms, and all control over the artistic process by fore thought and intention. To

ensure the unhampered operation of the "deep mind", which they regarded as the only

source of valid knowledge as well as art, surrealist tumed to automatic writing,

(writing delivered over to the promptings of the unconscious mind), and to exploiting

the material of dreams, of states of mind between sleep and waking, and of natural or

artificially induced hallucinations.

Largely an Italian Movement, 'Futurism' was the invention of Filippo

Tommaso Marinetti in 'Manifesto of Futurism' as it delineated the various ideals

Futurist poetry should strive for. Poetry, the predominate medium in Futurist poetry
has an unexpected combinations of images and hyper-conciseness. The Futurists

called their style of poetry 'parole in liberta' in which all ideas of meter were rejected

and the word became the main unit of concern. In this way, the Futurist managed to

create a new language free of syntax, punctuation, and metrics that allowed for free

expression.

The two most powerful forces on Modernist poetry in Britian came from

France and the United States. The first brought symbolism and vers libre (free verse),

the second a hybrid Anglo-American Imagism and the dry, contemplative, intellectual

and allusive poetry of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.

Symbolism as a literary movement is thought to be having been formally

introduced by French writer during the second half of the 1gthcentury. It emerged as

a reaction against Realism, which put a belief upon the objective world. But for the

symbolist the objective world was not through reality but rather a mere reflection of

the absolute one. They believe that true realities of nature can be perceived by the

work of art. And artist possesses a power to create the universe of his own, but the

reader cannot share her or his emotion directly. Therefore everything should be

suggested by symbols which are necessary to express what they experienced. These

tendencies of giving more focus in the art gave birth to the symbolism. The

symbolists never describe things directly; instead they use one thing to suggest

another. Charle's Baudelaire in France and W.B. Yeats in England are known to be

the innovators of symbolism.

The most influential figure was Stephane Mallarme whose advice to depict not

the thing but the effect is a kind of symbolist motto. He advocated a new drama

portraying the mental life, not the world of the senses. For the symbolist, art is
a means of understanding rather than feeling, and since they despised mundane

reality, the symbolists were antagonistic towards Realist drama. Symbolist drama

tends to be learned and decidedly static.

Realism in drama encouraged Realism in the theatre-in sets and stage craft, as

well as acting. Among the leaders in this development were Sir Henry Irving at the

Lyceum Theatre in London, where he induced nightly fainting fits with his highly

detailed production of the famous melodrama, The Bells (1871); Duke George I1 of

Saxe- Meiningen, who with his actress-wife formed a touring company in which the

actors spoke rather than enunciated.

Many European dramatists had a deep impact on Modernist literature across

the genres, even though their perceived radicalism was too great for contemporary

theatre producers or audience in London, Drama was written by several pre-eminent

modernists in Britain, such as T.S Eliot, W.B.Yeats, D.H. Lawrence and Wyndham

Lewis, and was also evident across Europe in the Movements better known for their

fine art; most notably expressionism, Italian Futurism, Dadaist Cabaret and Antonin

Artaud's Surrealist 'Theater of Cruelty'.

An invention of the nineteenth century, the modern short story has been

described as a compact prose narrative designed to elicit a singular and unified

emotional response. As such, critics have made formal distinctions between the short

story and its generic predecessor, the tale, a short narrative sometimes of oral origin.

Likewise, commentators have contrasted the short story with the lengthier novella and

novel, both of which typically feature a greater complexity of themes, multiple

characters, and intersecting lines of plot. European and American writers first

articulated the formal qualities of the modern short story in the second quarter of the

nineteenth century, which coincided with the rapid proliferation of periodical

publication in the industrializingnations of the western world at this time, and thus it

is thought to have been broadly influenced by economic as well as literary stimuli.

Early innovations in the genre appeared in the short fictional prose of such writers as

Prosper Merirnee, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walter Scott, and Nikolai

Gogol, to name only a few. The short story is traditionally thought to have reached

a peak of maturity in continental Europe during the late nineteenth century with the

Naturalistic pieces of Guy de Maupassant and Anton Chekhov, and a generation later

in English with the publication of outstanding Modernist works in the Anglo-

American tradition.

Washington Irving is considered a seminal writer of short fiction in the United

States, with his collection of tales called the Sketch Book (1820) often desaibed as a

foundational text. Including the outstanding pieces Rip Van Winkle and The Legend

of Sleepy Hollow, the Sketch Book foreshadowed the future development of the short

story in America with its blend of incisive wit, satire and narrative virtuosity. After

Irving, scholars generally focus on Edgar Allan Poe as a crucial figure in the

development of the short story. In his 1842 essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-

Told Tales (1837) Poe outlined the principal features of the genre, claiming that it

should be readable in one sitting and that its effect, similar to that of lyric poetry,

should be singular and total, designed to evoke a primary emotional reaction in the

reader. Additionally, Poe's writings, such as his seminal stories of psychological

horror and detective fiction collected in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque ( 1 840)

and later volumes, exemplified his evolving theories. Meanwhile, Hawthorne's short

stories in Twice-Told Tales and Mosses fiom an Old Manse (1846) offered an

innovative blend of allegorical symbolism and internalized character study that, while

not immediately successfbl with American audiences, proved immensely influential.

In addition to the psychological works of Hawthorne and Poe, the pieces collected in

Herman Melville's Piazza Tales (1856) including the stories "Bartleby, the Scrivener"

and "Benito Cereno", illustrated a continued transition toward increased realism,

internalized delineation of character, and narrative distance in American prose fiction.

Kipling, J.R. (1865-1936) a noble laureate of English origin, wrote novels,

poems and short stories, mostly set in India and Burma during the time of British rule.

His stories show form, shortness, construction, completeness and no loose ends. The

other contemporary of him, Lawrence, D.H.(1885-1930) stories are precise,

economical and excellently designed. He is more a poet, prophet or a psychologist

than an entertainer. He is one of the inventors of a new type of short story where

'plot' is of secondary importance. It is situation or atmosphere or sensuous

evocations of nature that really matter in the short stories of Lawrence, than the plot.

Guy de Maupassant a Frenchman wrote about 300 stories. His approach is

naturalistic: direct, detached, almost scientific, artistically skilful and no

psychological insights are provided. Anton Chekhov a Russian dramatist and a short

story writer, is one of the foremost figures in Russian literature. He was largely

responsible for the modern type of short story that depends for effect on mood and

symbolism rather than on plot. His narratives, rather than having a climax and

resolution, are a thematic arrangement of impression and ideas, using themes relating

to the every day life of the landed gentry and professional middle class, Chekhov

portrayed the pathos of life in Russia before the 1905 revolution: the futile, boring,

and lonely lives of people unable to communicate with one another. Early literary

historian of modernism concentrated on a select band of male authors, such as Eliot,

Pound and Joyce in England, and Gide and Proust in France, ignoring the work of the
female writers of the time, believing them to be of little or no interest. According to

Virginia Woolf (1966 320) in or about December 1910, human character changed.

She was r e h i n g to the end of the Edwardian era, together with the Post-Impressionist

exhibition mounted by Roger Fry in London at the end of 1910, with the implication

that all forms of traditional mimetic representation, both in literature as well as art,

would never be the same again.

Kathleen Beauchamp, better known as the writer Katherine Mansfield, was

born in Wellington, New Zealand, on October 14, 1888. Katherine Mansfield showed

an early interest and talent for literature. At the age of nine years, attending the

village school in the township of Karori in the New Zealand inland, she won the first

prize for English composition. At the age of fourteen, Mansfield and her two sisters

were sent overseas to be educated at Queen's College in London, a three-year long

education during which she also edited the college magazine.

Katherine Mansfield's first book, 'In a German Pensioni(191I), is a collection

of stories which she wrote when convalescing in Germany. But it was not until the

collection 'Bliss and Other Stories' (1920) that Katherine Mansfield's literary career

took off. The book included some of her best short stories, such as Bliss,Prelude and

Je Ne Parle Pas Francais.

Dying the period 1910-191 1, Katherine Mansfield wrote for the New Age and

its editor R.A. Orage. In December 1911, Katherine Mansfield met her future

husband, John Middleton Murry, an Oxford undergraduate who at the time edited

a 'youthful literary magazine' called Rhythm together with Michael Sadleir. In this

magazine Katherine Mansfield started to write r&larly. According to Murry, her

first contribution was 'The Woman at the Store' (1912), which caused 'a minor
sensation'. In the winter of 1915, Katherine Mansfield, John Middleton Muny and

D.H. Lawrence started a small literary magazine called 'Signature' which was written

by themselves, but the magazine died within two months and three numbers. In 1919,

John Middleton Murry became editor of 'The Athenaeum' where Katherine Mansfield

wrote weekly criticism of novels, and, after a short time, also contributed monthly

short'stories. In the period 1918-1919 J e oe Parle Pas Francols was printed and

published by John Middleton Murry and his brother for private circulation. In 1918,

Prelude was published as a separate piece by Virginia and Leonard Woolf at their

Hogarth Press.

Katherine Mansfield's contribution to 'The Athenaeum' was becoming

recognized, and publishers started to ask her for more stories. After 'Bliss and Other

Stories', the next collection, 'The Garden Party and Other Stories' was completed

while she was based in Switzerland in the autumn of 1921. Katherine Mansfield

established herself as 'the most remarkable short-story writer of her generation in

England. Her volumes published posthumously are 'The Doves Nest and Other

Stories' (June 1923) and 'Something Childish and Other Stories' (1924). Katherine

Mansfield died in January 1923 at the 'Gurdieff Institute for the Harmonious

Development of Man' in France, after suffering from tuberculosis for nearly five

years.

Probably the most important modernist writer who migrated to the

metropolitan centers of Europe from the distant margins of empire was Katherine

Mansfield. And migrate she did, in the fullest sense, to the heart of the metropolis

where human character was being "changed" by the intellectual and aesthetic power

of the avant-grade. She was to claim and receive a complex membership in the very
core of this power Woolf s Bloomsbury group. Similar to many other members of the

elite Bloomsbury circle, Katherine Mansfield was a major influence in shaping the

emergent traditions of experimental fiction in the early decades of the twentieth

century. The colonial condition is instmental in evoking Katherine Mansfield's

stories, a stifling sense of a dull, uneventful everyday life as an index of the socio-

cultural inadequacy that the colonial periphery comes to identity in itself Specifically,

her stories reveal the unique socio-psychological process through which the emotion

of boredom, as a response to the perceived banality of private lives, reveals the

historical constrictions on the life of the settler colony. As a colonial writer Katherine

Mansfield reveals telling stories of futility, restlessness, and emptiness of a world

where such desires are teased but never satisfactorily fulfilled.

Katherine Mansfield's chosen form, the short story, is in some ways

controversial because it divides readers into two camps: those who cherish the short

story for itself and those who consider the short story as a mere practice for the more

sustained work of writing long fiction. Elsewhere, she makes an important distinction

between the 'Short Story' and 'Short fiction'.

The modernist short story grew out of the psychological sketch of the

1890's. Like the psychological sketch it is more properly called a type of

short jction for one of its leading characteristics is a rejection of the

'story' in the accepted sense. Modernist shortfiction writers distrusted the

well-wrought tale for a variety of reasons. Most importantly they argued

that the pleasing shape and coherence -of the traditional short story

represented a falsification of the discrete and heterogeneous nature of

experience (Hmon, C. 1985 55).

 There was no real tradition of short story writing in England, and few worthy

examples until the twentieth century, whereas the opposite was true in France, with

a well established high quality tradition, dating back at least two centuries. The

ascendancy of the modem short story in Eng1an.d was concurrent with the emergence

of modernism. The 'old-fashioned' story with a plot, is now set against 'a slice-of-

life', unstructured, psychological story, as exemplified by Virginia Woolf and Joyce

and especially Katherine Mansfield.

'Modernism' was also used at the end of the eighteenth century to refer to

trends characteristic of modem times and in the nineteenth century it was associated

with modern opinions, styles or expressions. Only in the 1960's was the term

'modernist' used to describe a generation of writers and also a literary phase as

opposed to contemporary writers of the moment. The roots of modernism are believed

to be in the works of French authors Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert who

described 'Modernity ' as the fashionable, fleeting and contingent, and or in the works

ofjndesiecle writers (Child, P. 2000 14-16).

Katherine Mansfield herself h e w that she was searching for the new, the

experimental, but did not know herself what to call it:

The form I would choose has changed utterly. I feel no longer concerned

with the same appearances of things. The people who lived or whom I wish

to bring in to my stories don't interest me aiy more. The plots of my

stories leave me perfiectly cold. [...I but especially I want to write a kind of

long elegy ... perhaps not in poetry. No, perhaps in prose. Almost

certainly in a kind of specialprose (Kimber, G. 2008 85).

 Through a close reading of one of the Katherine Mansfield's stories, the

influence of the poetic genius of Baudelaire extended on her is noticed. The way the

influence manifested itself in her work reveals how it enabled Katherine Mansfield to

find a way of extending the boundaries of her own prose expression.

Antony Alpers, in his biography of Katherine Mansfield, describes her in

London in 1908, aged twenty, as, 'a girl in a hostel writing things, struggling quite

alone to discover a form with no idea where to turn for the critical guidance that every

young writer needs'. Kaplan, S.J. (1991 83) believes that:

Unlike many older writers who had learned their craft through imitation

and rejnement of traditional narrative conventions, Mansfield - at the

very beginning of her career - began, through the dominant influence of

the symbolists and decadents, to writefiction committed to the possibilities

of narrative experimentation.

She was certainly one of the first 'modem' women writers, attempting a

writing career in a field dominated by men, while living alone in a foreign city at a

young age. For Alpers, A. (1980 81) her main difficulty at this time was precisely

this struggle with trying to find a unique form of her own:

She was not by nature a novelist -she had nothing to offer to publishers of

books her aim was something else - to "intensi$ the so-called small things

So that truly everything is significant ". The short story in that sense did

not exist in England yet. There was no place for what she wished to do.

No place, either,for what young Joyce had been up to, over in Dublin.
 Wheeler, K. (1994 125) expresses ail the definitions of the Modemist short

story which have evolved over the years and Katherine Mansfield's work into this

body of evidence:

Modernist jiction largely dispensed with (or even de-emphasised ) plot,

action drama, structure, shape, development, and so on [....I These

conventions are used in the service of the greater expression of the interior

life, though not at the expense of social relations and externalized

dramatics which provide a social-realist context. Mansfield's stories and

many other modernistfictions, then, are not quite accurately described as

rejecting such conventions , so much as for wrenching them away fiom

traditional emphasis on the realistic representation of external, social,

public relations, which relegate interiority to the sidelines or even into

virtual non-existence. One could argue that Mansfield artfilly hid the

"mechanics" of her stories, as artists need to do.

In the evolution of literary modernism during the first quarter of the twentieth

century, Katherine Mansfield can be placed within the movement because of the work

she produced together with the philosophy which lies behind her narrative art.

Kaplan, S.J. (1991 1-2) comments explains about the significance and

development of Katherine Mansfield as:

To insist on MansJield b significance to the development of modernist

jction might surprise some of the current reversionary critics of

modernism, who have nearly erased herfrom the history of the movement,

but it would not have surprised critics during the 1920s or 1930s, when

Mawjleld was widely imitated, diswsed, and revered.

 Katherine Mansfield's biographer Kaplan, S.J. (1991 64) explains about her

development of techniques and influences by the literary giants like

Pater and Symons provided techniques that Mansfield would w e later to

uncover, at its deepest level, the culturally determined condition of women.

By importing symbolist devices into realisticfzction, Mansfield exemplifies

how the male-bonded nineteenth century aesthetes became absorbed into

the twentieth centuryfeminist consciousness. Some of her brilliance lies in

her realization that the symbolism of the aesthetes could bejoined, as well,

to a twentieth-century epistemology - partially Freudian, partially

feminist. Her use of the '90s influence veers away from the occult,

abstract direction it took with Yeats,for example, and it never goes to the

extremes of Joyce with his preoccupation with symbolic language, myth

and metafiction.

For many readers, both in England and especially in France, the perception

was that she was writing children's fiction. Though children may be depicted in many.

of her most famous stories, her themes are adult in both form and content. However,

the notional superficiality of her stories, made the critics perceive her 'form' to be

a 'minor' form and viewed Katherine Mansfield as a Minor writer - Marginalized in

particular ways during her lifetime and in rather different ways after her death

(Scott, M. 2001 299).

 Katherine Mansfield's fiction - and Modernism as a whole associated with

a rejection of the conventional plot structure and the dramatic action in favour of the

presentation of character through narrative voice. Dominic Head (1992 16) says that :

the plotted story, of which Maupassant is seen as jgurehead, is set

against the less well structured, often psychological story; the "Slice - of-

life" Chekhovian tradition. It is to this tradition that the stories of the

Modernists (those of Joyce, Woolf and Mansfield in particular) are

usually said to belong.

In terms of her own influences, Katherine Mansfield was greatly indebted to

Chekhov; indeed, she is perhaps one of the earliest writers in English to make use of

Chekhovian innovations, his attention to detail his interest in characters, his

philosophy, to iniroduce Chekhov's style to the English short story. Katherine

Mansfield in the context of world literature is a writer whose origins and interests

mark her as profound writers. Katherine Mansfield is considered as:

the centralfigure in the development of the modem short story, she har often

taken a back seat to her contemporaries, fellow modernbts such as J a m

Joyce, TS.Eliot and firghia Wooit though WmlfherselfdeemedMansjeld

the only writer whose workshe had beenjealous of (Briggs, J. 2006).

Katherine Mansfield is exponent of the 'Plot less' story, concentrating on

inner mood and impression rather than on external event. Until the twentieth century,

the English Short Story had in general retained the well-proven services of the audible

narrator, a figure whose function was to establish values, scene and tone. But in

Katherine Mansfield's work the action is presented to the reader as a 'happening'

without a palpable narrator to stand between the reader and the truths he perceives.
By dispensing with the narrator. it got rid of explaining. It lent itself to the portrayal

of every day life and forswore long periods of time. In this type of narrative the

brevity was that of the flash and not of a condensed narrative.

Katherine Mansfield followed Chekhov's method of story telling. Hence, she

believed that fiction did not have to be shaped towards a conclusion, a climax,

a denouement. A fiction survives, not by leading as anywhere, but by being at every

point authentic, a recreation of life, so that to experience it and remember it as an

experience of actual life itself. The writer obliterates herself and becomes the

character she wishes to represent.

The turn of 20' century also gave rise to the plot less story, owing to the

intellectual climate of this period. In a world where God was dead and evolutionary

theory produced a sharp sense of man's insignificance in a changing universe, the

only alternative seemed to be the retreat within, to the compensating powers of the

imagination with such a retreat came the stress on the significant moment or epiphany

and the importance of psychology in short fiction

Katherine Mansfield was heavily influenced by these techniques - it is said

that she plagiarized one of Chekhov's stories called "Sleepyhead". Another author

who followed in Chekhovian style was James Joyce. The most important contribution

he made to the innovative and experimental techniques of modernism was the

introduction of the 'epiphany', the meaning of which was first described in 17re

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In the view of Drabble, M. (2000 332)

epiphany means the sudden 'revelation of what ness of a thing ', the moment in which

the soul of the commonest object seems to us radian. Epiphany was later on wed by

Katherine Mansfield in her stories.

 Katherine Mansfield has been noted as an innovator of the short story form as

Gurr, A., and Hanson, C. (1998 131) have pointed out, underlining in particular her

skillful use of fiee indirect speech: Katherine Mansfield's development offree indirect
form was one of her most important contn'htiom to the art of the short story. Such

a form allows for directness and immediacy, enabling the intrusive presence of the

authot-as-narratorto appear to disappearfrom the text.

Thus the multiplicity of narrative voices and consequently of narrative frames

which cast different lights on the same story is a characteristic of Katherine
Mansfield's writing and help account for the double-sided nature of her stories as they
usually read both as enchanting and fiercely ironical. Taking a look at the different
uses of voice in Katherine Mansfield's stories will help better understand how to read

them.

Katherine Mansfield was among the earliest practitioners of the stream of

wnsciowness technique, using it to a great effect in rendering individual
consciousness and in representing subjective experience. Like her contemporary,
friend, and occasional rival Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield was not so much

interested in what happens but in how one feels. Her stories are built around
illuminations of character rather than plot developments.

Symbolism is the art of expressing ideas and emotions not by defining them
through overt comparisons with concrete images, but by suggesting what these ideas

and emotions are, by recreating them in the mind of the reader through the w e of

unexplained symbols. To name an object in a literary work is to banish the major part
of the enjoyment derived from the work, since this enjoyment consists in a process of
gradual revelation. By using symbols in the work, author enhances aesthetic
enjoyment through the process of gradual revelation. Besides, the w e of images and
symbols allow language to embody non-verbal experience.
 The range of character portrayal is narrow and circumscribed, but they have

the capacity to enter into the hearts and souls of the characters and to project their

emotions in such a way that we accept them as universally true. She succeeded in

presenting authentic pictures of personal relationship especially of children and adults

within the family. She makes the small happening of children luminous by

flood-lighting them. Their characters have no pedigree. They neither are devoid of

the details of the history of their forebears nor are they invested with details

concerning their vegetative existence. The character's immediate reactions to their

environment and their desires and motives are depicted with skill.

Simone de Beaviour famously deemed Katherine Mansfield the best female

writer of the everyday in the Second Sex (New York; Vintage, 1987), citing several

passages from Katherine Mansfield's work as evidence of the sudden revelations that

seize respectable, seemingly conventional women, but it is only in recent years that

Katherine Mansfield has become, increasingly, a subject for feminist scholars as an

important female modernist author. She did not publicly align herself with feminist

cause or because she did not author a feminist manifesto as her contemporary Virginia

Woolf had done with A Room of one 5 O w n which made Virginia Woolf as the most

significant female figure in English Literature modernism'.

Katherine Mansfield's feminist credentials are some what ambiguous; on the

one hand, she w k certainly interested in female consciousness, interested in rendering

female subjectivity, the feminine perception of the world and its many manifestations;

on the other, she was generally uninvolved in the suffigette struggle in England

choosing to remain largely outside politics.

 Katherine Mansfield was clearly concerned with the situation of women, the

power imbalance between the sexes in society. She deals with the casual cruelty of

male sexual and economic dominance, but does not, generally, offer the possibility of

resolution. However often her stories end with women unable of unwilling to gain and

enjoy independence or liberation.

The use of interior monologue, stream of consciousness and irony as narrative

techniques and a shifting of the point of view from one character to another are other

wmmon features in her short fiction. The questioning of one's identity in her writing

can be attributed to the sudden interest in psychology that arose in her time;

particularly to the publication of Freud, by the Hogarth Press. Jean, M., and

O'Rourke, R. (1991 114) state that it led to an interest in the unconscious and

questions of sexual behaviour, mortality and influence. From the symbolists she also

imbibed the notion of an essential self, discoverable only in moments of spiritual

inspiration. Arthur Sewell conveys the unique quality of Katherine Mansfield's style

thus:

Words only capture the "whole of the mind" when they are used poetically,

when the over-tones are given by shadows that memory and association may cart

over words - when words have a phantom -. life as well as sound and meaning

(Arthur, S. 1972 6).

She is often an intensely lyrical writer, whose prose frequently has poetical

quality. Her work is made up of images, of stream of consciousness, crafted with

meticulous attention to sound, to the lyrical, musical qualities of language. Katherine

Mansfield's stories are rarely about events; that is, although things may and do

happen, the focus of the stories is on the language that makes sense of these
happenings. While the beauty of her language and her uie of complex symbolism

have always been appreciated by critics, the extent to which Katherine Mansfield's

stories may also be read as providing critiques of her society has been emphasized in

more recent analysis of her work.

Katherine Mansfield pay's due attention to the formal qualities that is

hdamental to the experience of reading her work. The formal innovations of her

writing play an integral part in its engagement with the world. The oblique nature of

Katherine Mansfield's writing also means that, while her stories imply a critique of

colonialism, they do not demand a detailed knowledge of European of colonial

history; nor do they provide ready answers to readers who probe them for specific

political comments or affiliations. Katherine Mansfield's work continues to lend itself

to conscious appreciation of the methods through which it engages with these

concerns her symbolic use of imagery, the seductive, rhythmical qualities of her

language and her extra - ordinarily subtle narrative techniques

Katherine Mansfield is not forgotten, nor a particularly neglected, writer. Her

stories have remained popular and in print, and her biography has proved a source of

constant fascination. Angela Smith provides a useful account of Katherine

Mansfield's life in her introduction to the selected stories 2002, in which she

emphasizes the importance of the experiences of colonial life for Katherine Mansfield

in writing. During the decade following her death, John Middleton Muny, edited and

published her letters and other writings. Subsequent critics have felt the need to
'rescue' Katherine Mansfield h m reductively biographical readings of her work and

especially fiom the legend created by John Middleton Muny. More recent biographies

and authoritative editions of her letters and notebooks have made possible a more

complete and independent picture of her life and work. Mean while, criticism has

increasingly tried to move beyond reading her stories for their biographical interest

and for their purely formal qualities and consider their writer in literary and historical

context, though this argument remains open to debate.