Wednesday 8 March 2017

Inversion and Sexology: The Figuration of Gender Relationships in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Je Ne Parle Pas Français’


 Havelock Ellis’s 1897 work, Sexual Inversion, was one of the earliest comprehensive studies of Sexology in English. It argued a theory of homosexuality as a gender inversion; that is, a “masculinity complex” in homosexual women, and a “femininity complex” in homosexual men. Essentially, sexual inversion was believed to be an inborn reversal of gender traits. Havelock Ellis regards the innateness of homosexuality:

It requires a very strong impetus to go against this compact social force which, on every side, constrains the individual into the paths of heterosexual love. That impetus […] can only be supplied by a fundamental—usually, it is probable, inborn—perversion of the sexual instinct, rendering the individual organically abnormal. It is with this fundamental abnormality, usually called sexual inversion, that we shall here be concerned.[1]

Katherine Mansfield articulates the traditionalist theory of sexual inversion in her short story, ‘Je Ne Parle Pas Français’. Written early in 1918, it was first published in a small, privately printed edition; Mansfield’s publisher insisted that the full text be expurgated before it would be included in her 1920 collection, Bliss and Other Stories.[2] The story centres on the experiences of the male narrator, Raoul Duquette, who first introduces himself as a ‘Parisian, a true Parisian.’(p. 125). We soon find out he is also a ‘gigolo, literary dilettante, homosexual, and liar.’[3] He later asserts that he is ‘[a] little paid guide to the night pleasures of Paris.’ (p. 132). Mansfield’s figuration of gender relationships subscribes to the popular late-nineteenth century view of homosexuality as an inversion in her short story, through the representation of androgyny, inverted gendered behaviours and explicitly homosexual relationships.

Raoul’s original description of himself challenges gender norms through his distinctly androgynous appearance. He describes himself as:

[L]ittle and light with an olive skin, black eyes with long lashes, black silky hair cut short, tiny square teeth that show when I smile. My hands are supple and small… I confess, without my clothes I am rather charming. Plump, almost like a girl, with smooth shoulders, and I wear a thin gold bracelet above my left elbow. (p. 128)

His appearance is overwhelmingly characterised by smallness, daintiness, and femininity. The ‘long lashes’, ‘silky hair’, small and supple hands and ‘smooth shoulders’ are all suggestively female traits, and conventionally attractive ones at that. He lists the things he is given by women: ‘silk underwear’, ‘gloves and powder boxes and a manicure set, perfumes, very good soap’ (p. 127) – all particularly female-gendered items. Yet Raoul is never coy about his own identity as a male. He expresses:

‘I am a young man who has his own flat. I write for two newspapers. I am going in for serious literature. I am starting a serious career.’ (p. 127)

The resulting androgyny draws attention to a complex representation of gender, but also to the conventional ideology of the homosexual as having an excess of femininity, as being a woman inside a man’s body. Raoul is overwhelmingly effeminate– further exemplified in his role as a prostitute.

The representation of Raoul as paid gigolo, as an objectified, sexualised, individual, brings complexities to the figuration of gender relationships.  Raoul boasts that he has ‘never yet made the first advances to any woman’, that he is ‘rich, rich’, and that yet ‘nothing is paid for’ (p. 127). Mansfield articulates a world in which women are dominant, women own the wealth, and women have the agency to hire a man for his sexual services. Raoul lists the range of women who have approached him for sex:

[F]rom little prostitutes and kept women and elderly widows and shop girls and wives of respectable men, and even advanced modern literary ladies at the most select dinners and soirées… I’ve met invariably with not only the same readiness, but with the same positive invitation. (p. 127)

Sinisterly, Raoul asserts that if he ever finds himself in need of ‘right-down cash – well, there’s always an African laundress and an outhouse, and I am very frank and bon enfant about plenty of sugar on the little fried cake afterwards.’ (127). He refers to his sexual abuse by a woman as a young child and its impact on his current state of prostituting himself. Gender relationships are darkly inverted; where traditionally the victim of rape is female, and the aggressor is male, in Mansfield’s short story, the woman becomes the dangerous sexual aggressor and Raoul as a male child becomes the victim of sexual abuse. Mansfield challenges gender stereotypes, but only to an extent – the female character who is guilty of sexually abusing the young Raoul is also ‘African’, asserting that this sort of behaviour is not carried out by women in general, but by the dark, dangerous ‘other’ woman. Raoul’s role as desired object places him as a female-gendered character, as Mansfield inverts traditional gender relationships. This further highlights the underlying representation of Raoul as the sexual invert.

In ‘Je Ne Parle Pas Français’, Raoul is in love with another man, Dick Harmon. The heavily homoerotic language in the text depicts a male-to-male homosexual relationship. Nevertheless, Raoul’s relationship with Dick is highly resonant of a heterosexual relationship, with Raoul again taking on the role of sexual invert, of a woman within a man’s body. Dick maintains the masculine position of authority and dominance, whilst Raoul is subservient, a ‘little perfumed fox-terrier’ (p. 131), unconditionally subservient to his master. Raoul is flirty and coquettish around Dick; he is described as ‘making a pretty mouth at him’ (p. 129). The word ‘pretty’ invokes images of femininity, delicacy and diminution,[4] and this palpably feminine language is seen throughout the short story. Most notably, when Dick informs Raoul that he will be leaving Paris the following day, Raoul draws direct parallels with his own experience and that of a woman: ‘I felt hurt. I felt as a woman must feel when a man takes out his watch and remembers an appointment that cannot possibly concern her, except that its claim is the stronger.’ (p. 131) The language positions Raoul’s identity with that of a woman’s, and articulates a strongly-gendered scenario in which the man absently disregards the feminine who has lesser claim upon him, verbalising a world of business and appointments in which women have no place.  

Katherine Mansfield presents a heteronormative world in her short story, ‘Je Ne Parle Pas Français’. Whilst for her time she explores and challenges ground-breaking and radical issues, including female sexuality, androgyny and homosexuality, for a twenty-first century readership, her representation of homosexuality as sexual inversion is somewhat conservative. The figuration of gender relationships in her work do much to push social and cultural boundaries, but her traditionalist representation of homosexuality firmly grounds her in her time.

Blog post by Holly Anderson, MA English Literature student at Cardiff University.

[2] Katherine Mansfield, ‘Je Ne Parle Pas Français’ in Katherine Mansfield’s Selected Stories, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan (New York; London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006), p. 121, n. †. All further references are to this edition.
[3] Sarah Henstra, ‘Looking the Part: Performative Narration in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and Katherine Mansfield’s “Je Ne Parle Pas Français”’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 46.2 (2000), 125-149 (p. 127).
[4] ‘pretty’, adj., 2.a, OED Online (2017). Available at: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/151023?rskey=B5ZQ8d&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid  [accessed 16 Feb. 17].


Thursday 23 February 2017

'Spots of Colour': Impressionism and Woolf's Kew Gardens

In this post, I am going to trace the influence of Impressionism in one of Virginia Woolf's most famous short stories, Kew Gardens. However, before I begin examining the text, I would like to provide a brief introduction to Impressionism. 

The Impressionist movement rejected the conventional tendency to document the precise details of a moment in time, and instead sought to capture its general essence, or pervading emotion.[1]  

Impressionists were interested in finding new ways to represent light and movement, and often spurned studio-based composition, in favour of painting en plein air – in the open air.[2]

It was Claude Monet, perhaps the most well-known Impressionist, who gave the movement its name, with his painting ‘Impression, Sunrise’ (1872), depicting a hazy morning in the harbour at Le Havre – the artist’s hometown.[3] 



Impressionism was hugely influential, prompting artists the world over to imitate its style. The painter Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s sister, exhibited substantial influence of the movement in her work.

Woolf was inspired by her sister’s paintings, in which the depiction of light featured heavily and people’s faces were often indistinct – yet the work still conveyed so much emotion and meaning.

Woolf began to wonder whether the same could be done with literature. In Modern Fiction, she seeks to distance herself from the Materialist style of writers like Arnold Bennett, who were obsessed with representing life exactly as it was. 

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being “like this”. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel.[4]

This much-quoted passage is perhaps a good segue into discussing Woolf’s Kew Gardens, and its unique exploration of time, characterisation and place.

The opening paragraph is replete with Impressionist influence. Woolf notices the ‘spots of colour’[5] on the surrounding flower petals, gesturing to the techniques of Monet and his contemporaries.


This noticeable influence continues with the sustained treatment of natural light, as Woolf artfully describes its delicate movement across the lush summer foliage in the following passage.

[…] the light now settled upon the flesh of a leaf, revealing the branching thread of fibre beneath the surface, and again it moved on and spread its illumination in the vast green spaces beneath the dome of the heart shaped and tongue shaped leaves.[6]

As the narrative continues, people are introduced, but Woolf chooses not to dwell on providing accurate physical descriptions of each character, preferring instead to focus on their relation to space.

The figures of these men and women straggled past the flower-bed with a curiously irregular movement not unlike that of the white and blue butterflies who crossed the turf in zig-zag flights from bed to bed.[7]

The writer’s interest in painting is evident in her description of one of the first characters, Eleanor, who recalls an evocative memory with her husband. Here, Woolf alludes to Impressionism, and specifically Monet.

Imagine six little girls sitting before their easels twenty years ago, down by the side of the lake, painting the water-lilies, the first red water-lilies I’d ever seen.[8]

As Eleanor, along with her husband Simon and their two children, walk on and out of sight, Woolf presents an image of the family as if one were gazing directly at an Impressionist painting.

They walked on past the flower-bed, now walking four abreast, and soon diminished in size among the trees and looked half transparent as the sunlight and shade swam over their backs in large trembling irregular patches.[9]

As Woolf moves around Kew Gardens, flitting from person to person, fecund descriptions of the vegetation, and animal (snail) life, punctuate the moments spent with the different characters.

Firstly, we meet a married couple with children, then two men, followed by two elderly women and finally, a young couple. We catch snippets of their conversations – some are trivial; some are inane – but this of little importance. 

Woolf’s aim is to present a series of fragmented moments, or impressions, that when brought together, reveal a sense of what one’s experience of life might actually be like, in direct contrast to her Materialist forebears.

This is Woolf, the writer, using the philosophy and the techniques of the Impressionist artists to present an image of life at its most vivid, where everything is symbiotically linked, as described in the closing lines:

[…] all the time the motor omnibuses were turning their wheels and changing their gear; like a vast nest of Chinese boxes all of wrought steel turning ceaselessly one within another, the city murmured; on the top of which the voices cried aloud and the petals of myriads of flowers flashed their colours into the air.[10]


Seth Armstrong-Twigg. 



[1] Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. xiv.
[2] Jessica Gunderson, Impressionism (Mankato: Creative Education, 2009), p. 21.
[3] Ibid, p. 15.
[4] Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction, ed. by Andrew McNeille, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols (London: The Hogarth Press, 1984), v4, p. 160.
[5] Virginia Woolf, Selected Short Stories (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 46.
[6] Ibid, p. 46.
[7] Ibid, p. 46.
[8] Ibid, p. 47.
[9] Ibid, p. 48.
[10] Ibid, p. 52.