INAKORI Critical Journal of the Katherine Mansfield Society Editors: Dr Kym Brindle and Dr Karen D’Souza Issue 4 (Summer 2020) Home, Space, and Belonging ‘But this is all a dream you see. I want to come home – to come home’ Letter from Mansfield to Murry [18 March 1918] T I N A K O R I I S S U E 4 S U M M E R 2 0 2 0 HOME, SPACE AND BELONGING Edited by Kym Brindle and Karen D’Souza INTRODUCTION KYM BRINDLE and KAREN D’SOUZA 1 ARTICLES A Home of One’s Own: House, Home and the Woman Alone in the Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield and Janet Frame POLLY HOSKINS 5 The Domestic, the Gothic and the Uncanny in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The House’ SHARON GORDON 14 The City as a Threshold in the Writing of Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys: ‘Wavering Between Two Worlds’ IMOGEN WALLERSTEINER 26 Redrawing boundaries: Challenges to Colonial Spatiality in the Works of Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys UTTARA RANGARAJAN 37 Domestic Settler Colonialism in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Old Tar’ and ‘The Garden Party’ MEGAN KUSTER 48 Katherine Mansfield’s Australia MARTIN GRIFFITHS 60 Interview with Professor Kirsty Gunn KYM BRINDLE 71 ABOUT OUR CONTRIBUTORS 76 Tinakori: Critical Journal of the Katherine Mansfield Society Issue 4 (Summer 2020) ISSN: 2514-6106 An official online series recognised by the British Library https://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org K Y M B R I N D L E & K A R E N D’ S O U Z A Home, Space, and Belonging: An Introduction ‘But this is all a dream you see. I want to come home – to come home’ Letter from Mansfield to Murry [18 March 1918]1 E would firstly like to express our great pleasure in taking on the role of new editors of Tinakori and extend our gratitude to Illya Nokhrin for the W work done on the journal to date. As incoming editors, we plan a series of themed editions and this, our first, explores ideas of ‘Home, Space and Belonging’. Our next issue will explore Mansfield’s creative treatment of the complexities of the topic of love and is now in process. We are pleased to offer six essays in this first themed edition, and we are also delighted to feature an interview with Kirsty Gunn, Professor of Writing Practice and Study at the University of Dundee, and Patron of the Katherine Mansfield Society. Professor Gunn is author of My Katherine Mansfield Project, a creative exploration of a very personal connection to place and Mansfield’s writing. Collectively the six essays in this special edition examine diverse critical aspects of home and develop current scholarship with comparative readings of Mansfield’s fiction alongside other Modernist writers like Janet Frame and Jean Rhys. Representations of home are ambivalent in the writing of Katherine Mansfield. It is familiar critical territory to suggest that a secure sense of home was an elusive concept for the Modernist writer, and a compelling case has been made for the dual impact of a divided colonial identity and her restless exile in search of a cure for the illness that eventually killed her. Mansfield preoccupation with her lack of a stable home is reflected in her short stories and, as Patricia Moran suggests, Mansfield’s fiction represents ‘home’ in terms of her ‘literal homelessness’.2 Throughout her unhappy journeying Mansfield found solace in vivid fantasies of an ideal home of her own. She took delight in material pleasures of home and her letters are full of descriptions of domestic surroundings both real and imagined; she shared particular aspirations for a settled home of her own with husband John Middleton Murry conjuring a typical stylised fantasy in a letter of 10 February 1918: ‘Our home is a cottage with a gold roof and silver windows’.3 Echoes of such yearnings are very evident in Mansfield’s fiction, and yet perhaps more evident is the recurrent thematic conflict that depicts a clash between domestic life and contradictory needs for personal freedom. Mansfield’s short fiction repeatedly presents liberation from domestic obligations as a captivating prospect making a Tinakori: Critical Journal of the Katherine Mansfield Society Issue 4 (Summer 2020) ISSN: 2514-6106 An official online series recognised by the British Library https://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org 2 TINAKORI compelling case for home as a place of estrangement and conflict, yet any quest for female identity beyond socially conscribed roles of wife and mother often leads to fragmentation of self and consequent converse fantasies of return home. Such contradictions reflect what Janet Wilson calls ‘Mansfield’s problematics of location, her ambivalence about home and her ontological state of “(un)belonging”’, and this edition of Tinakori seeks to further explore the significance of home in conjunction with ideas of homelessness or ‘(un)belonging’ for Mansfield’s creative imagination.4 Roberta Rubenstein reminds that ‘belonging is a relational, reciprocal condition that encompasses connection and community’.5 Connection and community in tension with individuality create a maelstrom of problems for female identity in evolving modern times and the essays in this collection investigate creative responses to these challenges. This issue focusses on intersections between desire for home and the social reality of circumscribed domestic space that proves so challenging for so many female characters in Modernist texts. Liberation from home and domestic responsibilities creates transitional states: characters are depicted paused on thresholds to either escape from home or retreat back there. Our first essay by Polly Hoskins entitled ‘A Home of One’s Own: House, Home and the Woman Alone’ contrasts a selection of stories by Mansfield and Frame to consider women’s engagement with domestic life and transformative experiences of solitude and seclusion. Exploring a New Zealand context negotiated individually in gendered terms, Hoskins develops her argument to suggest that stepping beyond the confines of home to spaces between places – including the natural world – can provide a threshold for transition thereby enabling imaginative journeys that re-evaluate home. Home is often vividly represented as a psychic space in imagination and memory. Rosemary Marangoly George indeed suggests that ‘fictionality is an intrinsic attribute of home’, arguing that ‘home is also the imagined location that can be more readily fixed in a mental landscape than in actual geography’.6 Sharon Gordon’s essay is firmly in this territory and her analysis of an underexplored short story of Mansfield’s, ‘The House’ (1912) offers a nuanced reading of this ghostly narrative, finding autobiographical resonance with Mansfield’s relationship with Garnett Trowell. Gordon’s article entitled, ‘The Domestic, the Gothic and the Uncanny in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The House’’, draws upon a critical framework of Gothic themes of the uncanny to investigate fears and anxieties centred on female sexuality and a lost home and child. Ideas of an abject body and liminal space combine to cast new light on symbolism in this little discussed story of a haunted house. Space and transition are also explored by Imogen Wallersteiner in her essay, ‘The City as Threshold in Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys: “Wavering Between Two Worlds”’. Wallersteiner considers intersections between class and commodity culture in the city making an argument that urban space can be a precarious and hostile environment for women when potential for urban freedoms confronts gendered and class-based restrictions. This article examines the ways in which metropolitan consumerism and aspirational fashion fuel desires for disguise that mask a precarious sense of identity. Class differences for cultural and colonial outsiders are debated to compare the Modernist fiction of Mansfield and Rhys with a focus on tensions between self-individuality and belonging within the city space. The postcolonial turn in Katherine Mansfield studies draws on a critical discourse that registers home as a place that is far from neutral; its materiality is grounded on contested space and is circumscribed by hierarchies of inclusions and exclusions. A sense of home, thus, becomes more critically dependent on notions of identity and INTRODUCTION 3 community. As George notes, the select inclusions that distinguish home are premised on ‘a learned (or taught) sense of kinship that is extended to those who are perceived as sharing the same blood, race, class, gender, or religion.’7 Yet, as the following two articles in this edition of Tinakori suggest, it is the barriers and exclusions that are frequently more potent, creating tensions between what Minnie Bruce Pratt aptly identifies as two specific modalities: ‘Being home’ and ‘not being home’. Being home, then, refers to ‘the place where one lives within familiar, safe, protected boundaries’; not being home, ‘is a matter of realizing that home was an illusion of coherence and safety’.8 A critical lens attuned to the exclusions permeated through specific colonial histories, coupled with contemporary modernist studies that seek to move literary analyses beyond that of stylistic phenomenon, may discover representations of home that draw on the conventional tropes of English fiction only to disrupt or question their validity. The location of modernist writers whose own states of liminality register the relationships between colonial structures and the metropolitan centre is explored by Uttara Rangarajan in her article ‘Redrawing boundaries: Challenges to Colonial Spatiality in the Works of Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys’. This article provides a complementary comparative reading of Mansfield and Rhys to that of Wallersteiner’s, and sheds further light on how the dialectic between centre and periphery is challenged by writers who occupy ambivalent geographical and political subject positions. Although the settler and plantation colonialisms of New Zealand and Dominica, respectively, have quite different histories of oppression and resistance, the psychobiographies of Mansfield and Rhys reveal distinct continuities that become manifest in expressions of belonging.