Windows of Loneliness: domestic and public spheres in The Well of Loneliness

Windows act as the threshold between the private sphere of the home and the public sphere. Patriarchal society encodes gender into these spaces: the domestic sphere as supposedly the realm of women and the public sphere as that of men. Thus arbitrarily coding spaces however relies upon the acceptance of a gender binary. A character such as Stephen Gordon in The Well of Loneliness, whose gender identity disrupts the gender binary, then disrupts the gendered coding of these spaces. Furthermore, the window gains yet greater significance in its liminality because of this disruption.

During Stephen's childhood and adolescence at Morton, Radclyffe Hall often situates Stephen in the public sphere. While her father is alive, Stephen's freedom in activity and behaviour is not so strictly curtailed as it might be - that is to say that her father dilutes attempts of social conditioning on the basis of the sex assigned her at birth - and so Stephen has greater access to spaces that are dominated by men. Hall uses Stephen's relative freedom to subvert the positioning of women at the window, gazing outwards into a sphere in which their movements would be severely restricted - as Virginia Woolf exemplifies in A Room of One's Own. Instead, Stephen in her youth sees the windows of Morton as beckoning her home, as if the house itself is a character of ‘most compassionate kindness’ (p.109) and acceptance: ‘she fancied that Morton was thinking about her, for its windows seemed to be beckoning, inviting: “Come home, come home, come inside quickly, Stephen!”’ (ibid.). While Stephen sees Morton as part of her identity throughout the novel, looking upon the windows from the outside, beckoning her in, suggests that the home is Other to Stephen, more analogous to the way in which one might identify with a relative: sharing a common background, sharing a sense of connection and belonging somewhat but still distinctly separate. Moreover, Stephen’s understanding of Morton as home is not confined to the physical building but encompasses its grounds, as well as the surrounding environment as far as Stephen may see. In this way, Stephen's place in the domestic sphere and the public sphere is blurred: she both identifies strongly with her home, but her sense of home permeates beyond what we may conventionally consider as the domestic sphere, by absorbing in from the public sphere.

When Stephen's mother is made explicitly aware of Stephen's sexual orientation, Stephen's forced exile complicates her positioning within domestic and public spheres. Stephen cannot remain at home in Morton and, upon visiting, she feels disconnected: ‘she would feel like a stranger within the gates, an unwanted stranger there only on sufferance. […] its windows no longer beckoned, invited: “Come home, come home, come inside quickly Stephen!”’ (p.230). Her public appearances with her mother however must suggest of no scandal - no change - so Stephen's public persona must become a lie. This isolates Stephen and only by Jonathan Brockett's recognition of Stephen's queer identity can she again have a public life, albeit subcultural and exiled.

Within the circles of the Parisian subculture, Stephen and her partner Mary meet Jamie and Barbara. Frequently Hall aligns the two couples - Mary in particular often notes their similarity - so as to insinuate the parallels that the reader may draw between the couples in terms of character, dynamics and plotline. Hall describes Jamie and Barbara's dwelling in distinctly gloomy terms – ‘the distempered grey walls were a mass of stains, for whenever it hailed or rained or snowed the windows and skylight would always start dripping’ (p.394) -- but with ‘an eye-shaped window that would not open’ (p.395) in one of the rooms. In and of itself this window may have little significance - it is not the site of any significant plot development in the narrative, but as Jamie and Barbara's tragic ending foreshadows Stephen and Mary's own tragedy, we would do well to bear it in mind in the final scenes of The Well of Loneliness.

As the narrative draws to a close, the window at the threshold of the domestic sphere once again becomes of great significance. From the window of Stephen's bedroom that faces on the courtyard, she watches on as her final sacrifice – giving ‘light to those who live in darkness’ (p.482) -- pushes Mary into the relative protection of a relationship that will be read in society as heterosexual and therefore acceptable by the standards of the wider population – no longer an exiled relationship. As Mary and Martin disappear out of sight, the room fills with the spirits of inverts in a great culmination of queer purgatory. The imagery denoting purgatory finally situates Hall's undeniably queer characters in this liminal space from which they may only ever look upon a society which rejects them and infringes upon them – as the rain and snow leak into Jamie and Barbara’s studio -- without the freedom to truly integrate themselves in the public sphere – the eye-shaped window will not open -- while they remain isolated in the relative safety of exile within a queer domestic sphere. Here, Stephen indubitably learns that ‘the loneliest place in this world is the no-man’s land of sex’ (p.79).

- Ruth Tolerton

‘Love, the poet has said, is woman’s whole existence’: Orlando as an intertextual space for women, writing and literature.

Orlando acts a text that is a literary space where women and writing as a profession can be discussed. For Woolf, this text and the temporal space it occupies, has closest compositional genesis with her work A Room of One’s Own. Although much of her other work, including her short stories permeate around both texts. Orlando is a text which is also referential in its historical and contemporary literatures. Woolf utilises this to discuss ideas of gender, expectation and profession. This post considers these concerns, exploring Orlando as prism rather than a one dimensional shape.

Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, establishes the fictional concept of Shakespeare’s sister Judith. Judith’s own creative and critical output is ignored in Elizabethan culture and Woolf determines this predisposition down to her sex and gender. At the beginning of Orlando, the figure of the Elizabethan Orlando is able to achieve literary success in sonnets and plays, because he can, simply by his sex and gender being identified as male. By historicising this dichotomy as a space where this creative and critical output can achieve success simply by the nature of one’s gender, Woolf is using this as a demonstration of the problems women face in terms of their own professional identity. As the figure of Orlando transcends historical periods and gender, the unfinished nature of the work The Oak Tree is constantly interrupted by the difficulties he/she faces by this gender shift. It is only when the novel reaches its conclusion in contemporary 1928, that Orlando feels able to write uninterrupted.

However, this freedom of purpose is not as simple as this. Orlando is still a woman who has the financial and social means to establish her aim of finishing her work. And, the assumption that this attempt is a fleeting and non-serious concern for women still has potent political and social currency in 1928. Towards the end of the novel it is reflected ‘Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and woman in the prime of her life, she will soon give over the pretence of writing and begin to think of a gamekeeper (as long as she thinks of a man, no one objects to a woman thinking’ (p.133). Whilst this is an indirect reference to D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, it is a further permeation of what the text means in terms of women and writing. Placed at the end of the novel, it is a stoppage where Orlando and her profession can be examined and linked back to the beginning of the novel – and these same problems about gender, and professional purpose can be considered.

‘For masterpieces are not single and solitary births, they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common.’

A Room of One’s Own, p.68.

The literary inheritance that Orlando as text uses and what it seeks to provide to literature is an interesting space too. Woolf, who further establishes this later in AROO, as provided in the quote above makes use of this ‘thinking in common’ to achiever her own subtle aims. The use of Lady Chatterley’s Lover as previously mentioned, also acts as a contextual reference. The novel had recently been banned for its moral and sexual divergence from accepted norms, and Woolf is making sutble use of this and the societal contradictions it offers in the roles of women. Earlier in the novel, the parodic reversal the roles Jane and Rochester in Jane Eyre is used when Orlando meets her husband for the first time, when Orlando is found laying upon the moorland. Whilst this is seen as parodic, it acts as another illustration of what the text is seeking to achieve in terms of role reversal and gendered contradiction.  

Whilst the full potential and establishment of women and writing is never fully realised in Orlando, the text makes bold and innovative statements about the problems that surround that debate, one which Woolf would further strengthen and articulate throughout her literary and critical career. The text is an open space, and this has allowed it to interact and influence other texts in terms of gender construction and identity. Woolf ends the novel with ‘And the twelfth stroke of midnight sounded; the twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty-Eight.’ (p.162).  This lasting statement, finishes the novel with an optimistic look towards a future, whilst acknowledging the difficulties of the past and present. Its persistence is all the more prevalent, 1928, being the year of Universal suffrage for women. 

Ieuan Rees is an MA student at Cardiff University. He specialises in Twentieth-Century studies.  

Gendered expectation: Performance identity, the party and the Middlebrow in The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby

Winifred Holtby published The Crowded Street in 1924, becoming part of the emerging and financially marketable middlebrow fiction genre. This was a significant female literary tradition in the inter-war years, that has until relatively recently, been given little critical attention. More so, these novels and in particular, The Crowded Street sought to interact with other prominent literary traditions such high modernism and impressionism. This post will consider this concern, specifically looking at how Holtby uses The Crowded Street to both affirm conventions of the middlebrow novel but also to challenge it.  

 

Nicola Humble in The Feminine Middlebrow Novel 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism outlines the problematic perception of the middlebrow genre ‘Middlebrow has always been a dirty word. Since it coinage in the late 1920s, it has been applied disparagingly to the sort of cultural products thought to be too easy, too insular, too smug…convenient literary fictions like ‘Modernism’, ‘the Auden generation’, ‘the angry young men’ leave little space for writers.’ This lack of critical space, as previously discussed, has resulted in middlebrow fiction to be overlooked or misunderstood through class bound misconceptions. As a result, literary innovations in such texts are yet to be fully recognised and thought upon in terms of critical introspection. Holtby opens the novel with the first chapter entitled ‘Prologue’, exploring the childhood of the novel’s main character Muriel. Muriel attends her first society party at the Kingsport assembly room and is fascinated by the dynamic of the party. There is also a prominent theme of preparation involved before attending the party, in particular the adults focussing attention on the child. In the case of Muriel, this preparation revolves around dress.  

 

Clothing and its importance is reflected in Muriel’s anticipation towards wearing a dress that has been chosen for her ‘She was at the party. Her new dress had been made by her mother’s dressmaker…There had been a lengthily ceremony of dressing before the nursery fire, with Connie dancing around irrepressibly, wanting to try on Muriel’s sandals and silk mittens.’ (p.4). This performance ritual, in the private, enclosed liminal space of the nursery, is a demonstration of the expectations for Muriel to transition from childhood to adulthood. In particular, it is also a gendered expectation for Muriel to represent a certain ‘type’ of heteronormative femininity. The preparation ritual for the party itself, is as significant as the event in terms of performance.

 

Later, at the party, this performance becomes more significant in terms of its gendered expectations. As each child walks from one side of the hall to the other, the female gaze is being applied, and centred directly on the females who are carrying out this act.  ‘Ladies in white trailing gowns, the mothers and aunts of other little girls at the party, drifted across it like swans on a lake.’ (p.3). This sense of the woman in white can be contextually drawn back to Victorian and Edwardian ideas of ‘The Angel of the House’, immortalised by Coventry Patmore’s poem of the same name in 1851. Holtby, I would argue, is directly making reference to the constraints of performance identity and the pressures of conformity and expectation. Furthermore, this performance is being replicated and reflected back on to the individual through natural elements of light and mirror imagery ‘Their reflections floated after them, silver-white along the gold. When Muriel rubbed her foot against the floor she could feel with joy its polished slipperiness.’ (p.3). This use of naturalistic elements transcends conventional literary technique and can act as an interaction point between Holtby’s assumed middlebrow convention and other traditions such as impressionism. 

 

Winifred Holtby further explores this focus, especially an apparent gender imbalance. When Muriel, who is still in the rapture of the party, speaks to Godfrey, she asks whether he goes to parties very often, to which he later responds ‘Not very often. These things are a bit slow. I like footer, and riding. I’m going to Winchester next autumn.’ (p.8). Even though Muriel asserts that she knows where Winchester is and its significance, this is a reference point about her lack of formal education. Winchester College is private boy’s boarding school which was founded in 1382, and Godfrey’s admittance to this school speaks a lot about his socio-economic circumstances. It is also a connection point between boy’s and girl’s being given different levels of education at the start of the 20^th century – with an emphasis on male dominated education and schooling systems. Holtby, it can be argued was aware of this difference, having being given a place at the University of Oxford. There is also a sense of frustration here, and this had been famously written about by Virginia Woolf, who called herself one of ‘the daughters of educated men’. Most tellingly, perhaps, is how the party is further gendered towards females performing and eventually becoming a certain kind of female identity. Godfrey on the other hand is merely an observer, his role is already assumed in the patriarchal structures that exist.

 

However, Muriel’s performance eventually results in public humiliation and failure. The narrator reflects ‘For, in her unhappiness, this was the most poignant anguish that by some mysterious cruelty of events Muriel has never found the party.’ (p.14). The party therefore, is a conceptual space that is bound by the success of gendered normativity. Whilst this is not fully made aware to Muriel, she feels a sense of desolation at failing to achieve this. This chapter in the novel is influential on the setting out of themes that Holtby later uses but also it exposes the difficulties of Muriel’s positon as a woman in the early 20^th century. This is a dynamic and fluid section of the novel which challenges the notions of what middlebrow fiction can offer. What Holtby achieves is dynamism between convention and revealing societal pressures and problems. By doing so, it enables Holtby to explore complicated and innovative themes in the mask of conventionality. The middlebrow therefore, is far from what it seems.

 

Ieuan Rees

 

 

 

 

 

Mrs Dalloway: A Psychoanalytic Reading

A hot London day in June; ‘the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging.’ (1) Woolf wrote a novel that narratively explored an ordinary day and the experiences the characters in the novel have on this singular day. The text was to triumph as a literary experiment: Mrs Dalloway (1925). Through various literary techniques, ‘tunnelling processes’ and the exploration of womanhood, Woolf sets up an impressionistic text that can be read through a psychoanalytic lens. Sue Vice describes psychoanalysis as ‘an interpretative strategy, concentrating particularly on the language which tries to render the body’s experiences, the role of sexuality in defining the self, and the construction of subjectivity and gender.’ (2) In this blog post I aim to explore this hot London day and examine the information Woolf sets up for readers to interpret. At times this analysis will cross over into a Feminist reading, however, this is understandable when analysing the position of women in a text that explores the mind of women in such depth.

What Woolf does so cleverly is use one event to explore multiple experiences. This allows the narrative to flow from one mind to another to the outside world and back into another’s mind. One event that highlights this narrative flow so well is the episode with the sky-writing aeroplane: ‘dropping dead down, the aeroplane soared straight up […] out fluttered behind it a thick muffled bar of white smoke.’ (p.17) This single event on an ordinary day allows Woolf to describe the event narratively through multiple characters - both major and minor. ‘“Glaxo,” said Mrs Coates in a strained, awe-stricken voice’ is compared to ‘“Kreemo,” murmured Mrs Bletchley, like a sleepwalker.’ (p.17) The minor characters are given the same significance as characters deemed major, such as Clarissa or Septimus. There is no hierarchy in experiencing life - one experience is not favoured above another - and this single event shows how an ordinary day can become extraordinary through the presenting of characters’ thoughts. Readers need and want these snippets of experience so as to build up a picture of what is occurring in the narrative. 

What aids Woolf in her depiction of this ordinary day through the mind of many is her impressionistic writing technique. She captures the sights, smells, sounds, and more which adds up to create an impressionist collage of a shared experience. If these impressions are repeated throughout life they can cause memories to rise. Take the use of a simple hairpin:

‘But she would remember going cold with excitement and doing her hair in a kind of ecstasy (now the old feeling began to come back to her, as she took out her hairpins, laid them on the dressing-table, began to do her hair), with the rooks flattening up and down in the pink evening light’ (p.29-30)

Throughout the text, certain impressions trigger past feelings. What becomes fascinating is what triggers these memories: hairpins, hat-making materials, fresh morning air. A memory can be triggered by any impression that has stayed long enough with the character to affect them in the same way once again. Through her use of punctuation Woolf is able to draw attention to these triggering objects. The use of parenthesis about interrupts her memory at Bourton, drawing a link between the past and present in the text with the stage direction like description presented in the parenthesis. Woolf emphasises how the ordinary, any usual object, can become extraordinary as it triggers the subconscious. 

The memories of Bourton become a key element in the narrative of Mrs Dalloway when reading it from a psychoanalytic viewpoint. Elizabeth Abel explains that ‘although the Bourton scenes Clarissa remembers span a period of several years, they partake of a single emotional climate that absorbs them into a homogeneous backdrop of the present day in June.’ (3) What become of interest in these memories is what is specifically remembered and the emotions tied to these memories. For Peter, his memories at Bourton are tainted with regret and pain. The memory of Clarissa telling him she was to choose Richard Dalloway is interrupted with the small impression: ‘how sights fix themselves upon the mind! For example, the vivid green moss.’ (p.54) Why is the ‘vivid green moss’ remembered? Do these small remembered impressions allow the reader to place meaning on these puzzle pieces? Woolf spoke of a ‘tunnelling process’ she used to give readers information on characters when she felt it important and necessary. Could these remembered impressions be part of this process? Potentially.For Clarissa, the memories of Bourton are filled with happiness and the remembrance of growth from girl to woman. The different presentations of the Bourton-related memories affect how readers will analyse the characters in the present day. It could be suggested that Clarissa’s fond thoughts of Bourton could be used as a mean to escape the dread she has been feeling all day. For Peter, the past acts as a record of what he perceives as his past failures and causes him to think about his current situation with regards to relationships, employment and his position in life.

Although the relationship between Clarissa and Septimus of importance in the text I want to examine the less explored relationship between Clarissa and Rezia Warren Smith. This allows me to discuss the importance of female space and female relationships with Mrs Dalloway. Clarissa and Rezia are both wives who have been removed from a ‘female paradise.’ (4) This female paradise is a space where women interact with other women, a space that is then interrupted by the War and the patriarchy. The connection between Rezia and Clarissa becomes apparent after Septimus’s death. ‘It seemed to her as she drank the sweet stuff that she was opening long windows, stepping out into some garden’ (p.127) is reminiscent of the opening of Mrs Dalloway where Clarissa remembers ‘she burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton.’ (p.3) The women are connected by spaces that are open to them. For Rezia it was the hat-making activity with her sister, for Clarissa it was Bourton with Sally Seton. Abel argues that ‘the death of [Septimus] releases Rezia to return imaginatively to a past she implicitly shares with Clarissa: the female-centred world anterior to heterosexual bonds.’ (5) The war acts as a dividing factor for both factors, creating a historical landmark that places them in ‘masculine present’ away from a ‘mythically feminine past.’ (6)

The influence of Sally on Clarissa becomes an influence that Clarissa remembers fondly. Although the ‘exquisite’ kiss they share could be interpreted through a lesbian lens, I argue that this kiss is a cementing of a female bond that Clarissa has, until Sally’s arrival, been devoid of. Woolf gives readers very little information on Clarissa’s childhood, focusing on just the memories of Bourton. Any personal information about Clarissa’s family is revealed by other characters. Readers are told about her sister Sylvia’s death by Peter, and her mother’s death is implied by Clarissa’s reaction after a party-goer informs her ‘she looked tonight […] so like her mother as she first saw her walking in a garden in a grey hat.’ (p.149) It becomes clear that Clarissa existed in a space with little or no influence of other women until Sally takes up residence at Bourton. I argue that Sally becomes a role model for Clarissa and this is why she remembers her so fondly. The kiss is recognition of the sacred bond between Sally and Clarissa, one built on teaching radicalism, gift-giving, and teaching that a mother or sister would have potentially given to Clarissa. 

Ultimately, this is just one reading of Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. However, a psychoanalytic reading has opened up some interesting points of discussion, espcially the history of Clarissa and the importance of female spaces in a text dominated by the aftershocks of the war. Impressionist techniques and free indirect discourse allow Woolf to transform an ordinary day into an extraordinary reading experience as readers are made to recognise the impressions they face everyday and their importance. The use of past and present narrative slips helps Woolf to 'tunnel' behind her characters, revealing (or in some cases keeping hidden) nuggets of information that would provide readers with many ways to interpret characters. The whole text is an experience that one should immerse themselves in to fully appreciate Woolf at her experimental best.

- Josie Cray

(1) Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)

(2) Sue Vice, 'Introduction,' in Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reader (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996) p.1

(3) Elizabeth Abel, 'Between the Acts in Mrs Dalloway' in Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) p.31

(4) ibid, p.34

(5) ibid, p.34

(6) ibid, p.42

Terra Nullis: Post-colonialism and Liminal Spaces in Mansfield's Short Stories

As a Modernist writer existing on the fringes of European Modernist literature, Katherine Mansfield inhabits a complex, post-colonial liminal space. With a number of her short stories set in New Zealand, I intend to examine how Mansfield uses liminal spaces to explore colonialism, arguing that Mansfield, herself, inhabited a liminal space. Defined as 'being on the boundary or threshold, esp. by being transitional or intermediate, between two states, situations, etc' (1) liminality is key when thinking about post-colonial writing. For the Gothic genre, liminal spaces are characterised by windows and doorways. This imagery moves into Modernist stories, seen in Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and other stories. Mansfield's innovative short stories characterise the liminal space as a place of travel and movement. Often characters make journeys on trains, boats, across countries and bodies of water with this time on transportation offering the characters time to reflect on their situations. Wilson contends that 'liminal spaces appear in colonial texts as those terra nullis locations ready to be written upon, interpreted, stolen, and named.' (2)

New Zealand, a colony of the British Empire, can be considered a liminal space. O'Sullivan argues that 'the almost innate belief in most New Zealanders [is] that theirs is a classless community, that the social hierarchies of an older world, if not quite shucked off, one certainly less constraining, has perhaps lead to odd distortions'. (3) This works in tandem with Bennett's observation that 'the transplantation of English culture into a New Zealand context leads to the question of what that culture 'really' looks like.' (4) So, it could be argued, Mansfield was living and working in a liminal, complex space. New Zealand was, as its name suggests, new (to the British Empire). And so, 'the complexity of a New Zealand cultural identity' (5) is something Mansfield addresses in her short stories. Using one of her famous short stories, 'The Garden Party' for analysis, I intend to examine how Mansfield explores New Zealand's cultural complexity from the viewpoint of class hierarchies.

After hearing about the death of a workman who lives close to the Sheridan's property, Laura Sheridan enters a state of contemplation. Is it still okay for the Sheridan's garden party to go ahead when a man from the neighbouring cottages has died? Would it be rude to the grieving wife? This accident and situation allow Mansfield to unpack ideas surrounding class in New Zealand. The dead workman is described as a 'drunken workman' (6) by Jose with Laura questioning this claim. The Sheridan's house and class position are then juxtaposed with the cottages, as Mansfield creates an image that highlights class disparity:

'The very smoke coming out of their chimneys was poverty-stricken. Little rags and shreds of smoke, so unlike the great silvery plumes that uncurled from the Sheridans' chimneys' (p.343)

Mansfield subtly highlights how class is societal concern that still prevails in New Zealand, despite the belief that New Zealand might describe itself as classless. The 'broad road' that separates the Sheridan's from the 'little mean dwellings' (p.343) acts as a threshold between two very different class situations. The road towards the Sheridans' house Laura travels to arrive at the cottages is 'gleamed white' (p.347) in contrast to the lane the cottages are placed on which is 'smoky and dark' (p.347). This road acts as a liminal space that Laura inhabits before she comes face-to-face with death and the privilges of her own class.  O'Sullivan notes that 'Laura's early amazment at a workman's delighting in the scent of lavender is merely a novice's version of her mother's fully fledge snobbery.' (7) Laura moves in an unstable place between recognising her position and understanding the luck of being born into a certain family at a certain time. The story of 'The Garden Party' allows Mansfield to deconstruct the notion that New Zealeand is a classless community. She uses liminal spaces so her characters can reflect on their position in the colonial community.

Mansfield found herself in the 'broad road', not able to idenitify as an indigenous New Zealanders nor what can be considered a "British citizen". Referred to as the 'little colonial' at school in Britain, Mansfield faced a 'liminal positioning between empire and colony.' (8) Bennett describes Mansfield position in relation to New Zealand - 'as an indentity and indentification - is a place that defines Mansfield above all, as displace, as placeless.' (9) Writing from this 'placeless' position, a space between two identities, Mansfield was able to examine life and identity from a unique position. Seen as the 'other,' Mansfield was able to explore liminal spaces and how they impact characters in her short stories in relation to post-colonialism and how being between two spaces affects indentities.

Josie Cray

(1)'liminal' adj. OED
(2) Wisker, Gina. (2007) "Crossing Liminal Spaces: Teaching the Postcolonial Gothic" Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, 7. 3 pp.401-26 (p.412)
(3) Mansfield, Katherine, New Zealand Stories, ed. by Vincent O’Sullivan (Auckland: OUP Australia and New Zealand, 1998) p.8
(4)Andrew Bennett, Katherine Mansfield (United Kingdom: Northcote House in association with the British Council, 2002) p.42
(5) Bennett, Katherine Mansfield, p.42
(6) Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories, ed. by Angela Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). p.344
(7) Mansfield, New Zealand Stories, ed. by Vincent O’Sullivan, p.9
(8) McLeod, John, ed., Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies (Routledge Companions) (London: Taylor & Francis, 2007) p.3
(9) Bennett, Katherine Mansfield, p.43

Extraordinary Dynamism: Woolf, Mansfield and Modernism

Extraordinary Dynamism: Woolf, Mansfield and Modernism 

Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield were literary contemporaries, rivals, and had deep personal connection. Both invested in what new modes of expression could offer in the 20^th century.  This was a process in which they could share similar political and social concerns, and attain some degree of self-actualisation for themselves and women more generally. This has allowed their work to be read together and separately when considering their own contribution to modernism.

Hermione Lee outlines both the personal and professional relationship between Woolf and Mansfield ‘So the remark about ‘friendships with women’ comes out of the heart of her extremely complicated relationship with Katherine. Their friendship was intimate but guarded, mutually aspiring to be competitive (If she’s good then I’m not). It ultimately disappointed her, but it was always tugging at her.’ This uneasy relationship had a deep affect on Woolf that would continue for many years after the death of Katherine Mansfield. It suggests that this rivalry limited the process of their work, but also encouraged them to create new meaning in a competitive environment, however damaging that potentially could be.  Lee continues ‘There were many crucial things about her that Virginia failed to understand, or understood too late – her background, her marriage, her illness. She was often snobbish and unkind about her. And Katherine too was ambivalent and inconsistent.’ This inconsistency from both led to a certain depth of misunderstanding. Alexandra Harris argues ‘But the relationship would be full of reserve, defensiveness, offences given and inferred. Mansfield lashed out with criticism, giving Night and Day a cold review. They felt they were working on the same things, but that made them all the more guarded with each other.’  This was a literary and personal friendship, and yet this was consequential in terms of their own work.

"I was jealous of her writing - the only writing I have ever been jealous of."

Woolf reflecting in her journal on the death of Katherine Mansfield

However, it is important to consider the different personal, geographical and social circumstances hat Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf held and how this worked into their own writing. Mansfield for example, had a natural interest in the uneasy relationship between Empire and its colonies and complications that arose around this. Woolf wrote from a different perspective, arguably a one of privilege, although she too sought to challenge this. 

The positive legacy of pairing these two writers together thematically is what they sought to achieve when explaining the positioning of women in society and how this can be problematised. Both Woolf and Mansfield represent women who were stringently forced into roles which may not have naturally suited them. Katherine Mansfield writes about this in her short story Bliss (1918). Bertha on discovering her own sexual independence and desire, discovers her husband’s affair with a friend. This hypocrisy is painfully displayed in Bertha, whilst juxtaposing this with her husband’s sterile, unemotional and ambivalent attitude towards the affair.  Mansfield is also writing about class too; the lives of middle class women who are left to sink or swim in terms of the limited domestic roles that are available to them.  Virginia Woolf also discusses these issues in many of her works, from characters such as Katharine Hilbery in Night and Day (1919) and more famously perhaps, Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs Dalloway (1925). Characters in these stories, from both Mansfield and Woolf all have some sort of epiphany in terms of realising their true selves. This was something that they were both interested in; the ability to consider yourself in terms of what people can stand for. Most of these realisations however were thwarted by power structures that existed for both genders in the early 20th century.  

This post is only a short examination of what Woolf and Mansfield’s work can offer when making thematic connections. Both contributed hugely to modernism and its concerns; a serious, and pressing need to make new literature. This shift away from traditional narratives and forms is something that is still being negotiated. Whilst their own relationship was troubled, it was also one that has an extraordinary dynamism to what could be created, thought upon, and realised in a period of significant change.