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. 

The Androgynous Mind in Virginia Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own'

While the term 'androgynous' may appear to undermine gender dualism -- which is predicated on gender essentialism -- on initial inspection, its truly neutral sense proves impossible in a patriarchal context. As Simone de Beauvoir argues in her introduction to The Second Sex (1949): 'man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity.' Furthermore, its implications in those individuals largely perceived as men (so clumsily termed because 'androgynous' has such a capacity to question our perceptions of other people's genders) are to effeminate attributes - a word which seems to carry exceedingly negative connotations.

To see the use of this word in Virginia Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own' however was rather exciting. Perhaps she could reclaim it for all its deviating qualities! She starts by questioning mental disparities between individuals of different sexes: 'Why do I feel that there are severances and oppositions in the mind, as there are strains from obvious causes on the body?' (p.92) Why indeed. Then, introducing this notion of unity that the term 'androgyny' would imply, she further questions, 'But the sight of two people getting into the taxi and the satisfaction it gave me made me also ask whether there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in the body, and whether they also require to be united in order to get complete satisfaction and happiness?' (p.93). While I dispute the dualism of this suggestion, and that they correspond  necessarily to the sex of each individual, Woolf also appears to suggest that all individuals have access to a wider range of mental attributes than merely those that are assigned to one's gender.

Unfortunately, Woolf then begins to reinforce gender essentialism with the notion of how one gendered mind predominates  over the other to parallel whether that person is a man or a woman: 'In each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man's brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman's brain the woman predominates over the man' (pp.93-4). Considering that androgyny denotes "hermaphroditism" - or intersex people - their fit into this now reinforced binary is disregarded.

She continues this vein of thought in suggesting a unity in the opinions of each gender: 'Do what she will a woman cannot find in [supposedly "masculine" books written by men] that fountain of perpetual life which the critics assure her is there. It is not only that they celebrate male virtues, enforce male values and describe the world of men; it is that the emotion with which these books are permeated is to a woman incomprehensible. […] The emotion which is so deep, so subtle, so symbolical to a man moves a woman to wonder' (p.97). This suggests that women all feel the same about writing which celebrates male virtues, enforce male values and describe the world of men. Woolf does not clarify what these supposedly gendered virtues and values are and I confess I know not a virtue or value that is specific to men. There is apparently an essential incapacity for one gender to understand an emotion of another gender, if it pertains to only the "masculine" mind or the "feminine" mind.

Woolf returns to suggest of writing without one's gender: 'It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. […] It is fatal for a woman […] in any way to speak consciously as a woman' (p.99). Perhaps my distrust of gender essentialism would suggest me to be empathetic with this idea, but I am not. I do not deny commonality in gender, but find this most perceptible  in the experience of individuals of the same gender, not in essentially inherent characteristics. That is to say, to refer to Alex Zwerdling's article, 'Anger and Conciliation in Woolf's Feminism', that the 'subjection of women' against which Woolf rightly holds considerable anger, is common to womankind. So, if one is not to speak consciously as a woman, but rather as neutral with an androgynous mind, one does disservice to the unexplored capacity of female writing. To apply my own questioning of strangely gendered terms such as "female writing", what is that if we are denying gender essentialism? Hélène Cixous' theory of écriture féminine is problematic in its own gender essentialism by suggesting that a feminine form of writing should write out of, and to the rhythms of, a female body. Susan Billingham however has suggested of the capacity to adapt Cixous' theory to transwomen and one could go further to expand the notion to other marginalised genders, because thereby one can write out of the shared experience of gender-based oppression. To adopt a neutral voice when one is starved of a voice will do nothing to quench that need, but to return to Simone de Beauvoir's claim, the neutral is absorbed back into the dominance of men.