Jm én o Au Masarykova univerzita tor Filozofická fakulta a 20 Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky 07 Bakalářská diplomová práce 2011 Petra Vazačová Hřbet Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Petra Vazačová Narrative Presentation and Interrogation of Social Conventions in the Stories of Katherine Mansfield Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph. D. 2011 2 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author’s signature 3 Acknowledgement I would like to thank to PhDr. Janka Kaščáková and to Stephen P. Hardy, Ph. D. 4 Table of Contents Introduction 6 Chapter one: The perspective of the child 11 Chapter two: The perspective of the young woman 21 Conclusion 36 Bibliography 41 5 Introduction According to Michel Foucault, our society has developed the systems of restrictions, which are more or less quietly obeyed by its members: we are not allowed to be outspoken in whatever situation: there exists a taboo of a topic, a ritual of circumstances, a privileged or an exclusive right of the subject, who is speaking. These restrictions intersect and form a grid, with dark fields in its tight corners. (Foucault, 9) Katherine Mansfield aimed her attention into these dark places; in her stories she concentrated on not very favourable and even taboo topics, such as child neglect and abuse, child sexuality, violence in marriage, victimization of women and lesbian love. Some of her first stories published in Great Britain openly described these topics, but later in her work she became more ´socialized´ and for the criticism she used more ´disguised´, sophisticated forms. In this thesis I intend to explore which social conventions Katherine Mansfield criticised and the literary devices she developed when creating her short stories. Another aspect I would like to concentrate on is Mansfield´s “New Zealanderness” and whether her New Zealand origin enabled her to view English society from a special perspective. For each story Mansfield chose a certain frame which she filled with a particular atmosphere – descriptions of light, descriptions of emotions and epiphany, an intuitive approach towards the story which she used in her stories helped to create an overall impressionistic effect. Julia van Gunsteren claims that modernist narrative techniques are already traceable in Katherine Mansfield´s adolescent journal entries. (Gunsteren, 17) She also points out the impressionistic approach towards the reality which was widely used by Katherine Mansfield in her later work: 6 “In Impressionism, “reality” is in rapid flux, always changing, evanescent; to portray the Impressionistic ´reality´ therefore, the episodes must be brief, capturing fleeting, and more or less intense moments of experience, in which characters and the world are perceived but not arrested. In this regard, Mansfield stories are Impressionistic. They tend towards accumulation, aggregates of episodes, rather then towards any continuous action. A story rarely proceeds from beginning to end with no lapses in chronology, or breaks between scenes. There are no expository links to explain what happens between episodes. ... Mansfield does not attempt to circumscribe reality or give it full definition.” (Gunsteren, 24) Observing how Katherine Mansfield achieved the impressionistic effect will be one level of the analysis. The other level will be the analysis of the narrative techniques which she used to lighten the dark fields of the post-Victorian society (to repeat Foucault´s phrase). She dived into consciousness of her characters to bring forth their deep thoughts, both sacred and profane, both naive and appalling; by showing fragments of characters´ lives she offered pieces of the picture of the changing society of her time. Martin Wallace described different methods of representing consciousness: “Mode of representing thought FIRST PERSON Past recounted (first person, past tense), usually as a journal, diary, autobiography, speaking to someone (skaz, dramatic monologue); writing to someone (epistolary novel); or addressing a reader. Direct discourse. 7 aPresent consciousness represented: “interior monologue” (first person, present tense), either talking to oneself or transcript of the mind. Direct discourse THIRD PERSON Psycho-narration: narrator describes contents of character´s mind (third person, past tense) Indirect discourse aQuoted monologue: ´interior monologue´quoted by narrator (narrative third person, past tense, character´s thought – first person, past tense) Direct discourse aRepresented speech and thought, or narrated monologue: character´s thoughts, in her own language, third person (both narration and thoughts in third person, past tense)” -------- aThese three types are sometimes called ´stream of consciousness´” (Martin, 140) Katherine Mansfield used both direct and indirect discourse in her stories and also another type of narrative method which Sydney Janet Kaplan called free indirect discourse – a transition between direct and indirect discourse. Free indirect discourse is formed by remarks or comments uttered by the narrator of the story but spoken as if in indirect discourse of the character´s inner voice. In the stories I intend to analyze, I will try to trace different types of discourse following Martin´s criteria, the shifts from direct to indirect discourse and how the transition contributes to Mansfield´s narrative style. 8 In her stories, Katherine Mansfield mostly captured a family life, showing the point of view of the most vulnerable person (yet not as a rule). I have chosen stories in which the narrator is a child (How Pearl Button was Kidnapped, Sun and Moon, a chapter from Prelude) and a young woman (The Little Governess, Bliss, The Woman at the Store). The story How Pearl Button was Kidnapped (1912) and The Woman at the Store (1911) were one of Mansfield´s first published stories in J. M. Murry´s review Rythm and both stories describe New Zealand from a rather unpleasant perspective; these two stories also captured the native Maoris, later in her stories Mansfield concentrated on ´higher´ society and the natives and the different culture values they accomplished were not mentioned (the short story Maata might be the only exception). The first chapter will examine how Mansfield described the child´s view of the adult´s world and child´s first reactions to a social training. Although Mansfield wrote a number of stories in which children play the main role, in these particular stories her criticism of absurd social values are most clearly visible. In How Pearl Button was Kidnapped the usage of symbols and associative ideas will be focused on and how these factors helped to create the tension and atmosphere in the story. In Sun and Moon the vulnerability of children and the neglect and indifference towards them will be discussed. Children´s social training and their first steps in power games will be shown when analysing the chapter from a short story Prelude. The childishness and naivety of a young woman is the theme of the story The Little Governess, which is the first short story to be analysed in the second chapter. Since there are only a few protagonists in this story, the use of direct, indirect and free indirect discourse is easily traceable and will be focused on. The story Bliss is one of the best Mansfield´s short stories and was much discussed from different points of view by many critics. The story is highly complex and its theme – woman´s love and what forms 9 it might take, was a rather unusual topic at the beginning of the 20th century. In the thesis, the female passivity, the women´s adaptation to social conventions and how the adaptations effect the women described in Bliss will be looked at. The theme of the story The Woman at the Store questioned the function and dysfunction of a marriage and woman´s duty to obey and follow her husband. Whether the woman can be live an independent life and what price she pays for her freedom will be analysed. Prior to the analysis, some biographical data from Katherine Mansfield´s life should be mentioned. Born in New Zealand as Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in 1888, she refused to live a provincial life in New Zealand. She set out for London to make a living as a writer and tried to live the life of a true artist. Yet she soon and painfully realized that the chances for a woman to live independently in London in 1910s are not much higher then in New Zealand. Struggling for living and for long periods merely surviving probably weakened her immunity system and she became terminally ill. It is possible that because of her diseases she became disillusioned with the lure and glory of an artist life and started to view her childhood as the best part of her life. Her New Zealand childhood memories, her experience with the city life, being both an outsider from a provincial town and an outcast (feeling so because of her contagious diseases), her experience of a woman in the world of men are all captured in her stories. Narrators of her stories are somehow excluded from the bright life of the well-off middle class society, they are passively driven into situations and events they are not able to control, and they are often weak in their characters. Although her personal fate might seem rather dark, she was an inspiration for at least two modernist authors – D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. According to Mansfield´s biographer Claire Tomalin (Tomalin, 126), her personality and perhaps even some episodes from her adolescence inspired D. H. Lawrence when he was 10 writing his Women in Love. Virginia Woolf described Mansfield in her diaries after Mansfield´s death with a striking vividness: “She had her look of a Japanese doll, with the fringe combed quite straight across her forehead.