Marginal Creatures?

Marginal Creatures? The Child Figure in Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction Marlene Andresen Masteroppgave i allmenn litteraturvitenskap Institutt for litteratur, områdestudier og europeiske språk Det humanistiske fakultet UNIVERSITETET I OSLO September 2017 II Marginal Creatures? The Child Figure in Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction Marlene Andresen Katherine Mansfield in 1914, aged 26 (Adelphi Studios). A Thesis Presented to the Department of Literature, Area Studies, and European Languages Faculty of Humanities University of Oslo September 2017 III © Copyright Marlene Andresen 2017 Marginal Creatures? The Child Figure in Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction Marlene Andresen http://www.duo.uio.no Trykk: Reprosentralen, Universitetet i Oslo IV Abstract This thesis investigates the critical dismissal of the child figure in Katherine Mansfield’s authorship, and demonstrates alternative ways of conducting literary analyses of four of her childhood stories: “Prelude,” “Sun and Moon,” “How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped” and “The Woman at the Store.” An evaluation of the reception history of Mansfield’s short stories reveals a process of infantilisation of not only her literary productions but also of her persona, and this reflects the marginalisation of the child figure in literary studies overall. The child exhibits a peculiar duality: on the one hand, it instigates empathic responses deriving from Romantic discourses, and on the other hand, it calls for Formalist and structural approaches based on modern notions of a hermeneutics of suspicion – in the end, it seems to struggle to navigate within this conflicting critical climate. Mansfield’s authorship, however, exemplifies literature’s unique ability to reconstruct the child’s world in ways which communicate not only an imaginative interpretation of childhood consciousness, but also the child’s ability to problematize normative belief systems, ideological constructs and social reality when used as a textual device. Combining structural concepts from narratology and strategies for close reading with social and historical criticism, this thesis showcases the complexity of the child characters in these four stories when employed as narrative devices. The aim of this study is thus two-fold: to raise the status of Mansfield’s experimental writings about childhood and to raise the child figure’s status in literary criticism overall. V VI Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Tone Selboe, for believing in this project and for always providing me with thoughtful and constructive feedback throughout this exciting and challenging process. In times of doubt your kind words of motivation have always inspired me to keep going and carry this project to its completion to the best of my abilities. Thank you to Gerri Kimber and The Katherine Mansfield Society for answering any of my queries and for the extensive resources which have been available to me through my membership. The expertise and enthusiasm in this scholarly community inspire a budding researcher like myself, and I am grateful for this opportunity to further immerse myself in the intriguing world of Katherine Mansfield. I would also like to thank my good friend and classmate, Kristine Amalie Myhre Gjesdal, for your feedback, our inspiring conversations and, not least, for those very welcome interludes in-between long work-hours over coffee or a cheeky glass of wine. Lastly, I am indebted to my mum for providing me with invaluable non-academic support. Thank you for motivating me to do my best and for always being an important anchor in my life. VII VIII Table of contents Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 1 1 Reception History and Critical Dismissal .................................................................... 11 1.1 Marginal statuses: Mansfield the woman, colonial and short story writer .......................... 12 1.2 The Early Years ................................................................................................................... 15 1.3 The Murry Years ................................................................................................................. 20 1.4 The past 40 years ................................................................................................................. 27 2 The Romantic / Modernist Child: Keiza and Sun ...................................................... 31 2.1 The cult of childhood: Romanticism ................................................................................... 32 2.2 The Romantic Child: “Prelude” and “Sun and Moon” ........................................................ 35 2.3 The cult of childhood: Realism and Modernism ................................................................. 41 2.4 Dismantling the Romantic Child: “Prelude” and “Sun and Moon” .................................... 42 3 The Colonial Child: Pearl Button ................................................................................. 49 3.1 Title and opening ................................................................................................................. 50 3.2 Dismantling colonialism ...................................................................................................... 51 3.3 Sensory experience as ideological critique .......................................................................... 53 3.4 Victorian domesticity, motherhood and femininity ............................................................. 56 3.5 Natural imagery, primitivism and colonial nostalgia .......................................................... 60 3.6 Pearl’s real kidnapping and the story’s ending ................................................................... 64 4 The Mad Child: Els ........................................................................................................ 67 4.1 The narrator’s authority and disguised investment ............................................................. 70 4.2 Demystifying the child’s “madness”: a suspicious reading ................................................ 74 4.3 Els’ mother and hidden ideologies: an empathic reading .................................................... 79 4.4 Hin and Els, Pākehā and Māori: suspicious readings .......................................................... 84 4.5 The final drawing revealed .................................................................................................. 90 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 95 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................ 99 Appendix ............................................................................................................................... 107 IX X Introduction Would you not like to try all sorts of lives – one is so very small – but that is the satisfaction of writing – one can impersonate so many people. Katherine Mansfield, 1907 (Selected Letters, 5–6) The child is literary studies’ Achilles heel, the uneasy dweller in a space between triviality and idealisation. In Katherine Mansfield’s fiction, the theme of childhood becomes a site of conflict. Many of her most famous stories revolve around child characters, and whether impersonated or described by adults, their worlds were something the author explored extensively in her writing throughout her short career. The aim of this thesis is two-fold: first, it constitutes a reassessment of Mansfield’s treatment of childhood, and second, it opposes the marginalisation of the child figure and seeks to strengthen its status in literary criticism overall. Literature’s unique ability to convey and conceptualise childhood experiences is exemplified through readings of four of Mansfield’s short stories: “Prelude” (1917, 2: 56– 93), “Sun and Moon” (1918, 2: 136–141), “How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped” (1912, 1: 285–288) and “The Woman at the Store” (1912, 1: 268–277).1 These texts, forming parts of a larger assemble of what I will henceforth call Mansfield’s “childhood stories,” showcase the duality of the child figure, the diversity of possible representations of child characters and the various textual effects unfolding in the reading-process as a result. Moreover, they demonstrate how children retain a shared origin rooted in a conceptual, Romanticist framework. Mansfield’s child characters continually negotiate with their intricate historical roots and the child figure’s very construction as an idea, and these problematics are directly linked to how readers and critics struggle to make sense of it as a textual device. Mansfield’s childhood stories, in their diversity and complexity, can offer new ways of understanding these issues without succumbing to the all too familiar pitfalls of trivialisation. Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp was born in 1888 in Wellington, New Zealand, and died 34 years later in Avon, France, after battling tuberculosis for years (Tomalin 5, 232–237). 1 All four stories will be cited from The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, edited by Gerri Kimber et al. This four-volume work contains Mansfield’s complete fictions; volume 1, The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield 1898–1915; and volume 2, The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield 1916–1922. I am not using original or subsequent publications

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