Tag: New Zealand

“The Woman At The Store” is one of Mansfield’s earliest stories, written for the magazine Rhythm. The aesthetic goal of this magazine was pity, brutality and a carefully wrought plot with adequate foreshadowing. It is now thought that this story is far from Mansfield’s best work. Continue reading “The Woman At The Store by Katherine Mansfield”

“At the Bay” (1921) is considered one of Mansfield’s best short stories, by a writer at the height of her powers. This is one of the three about the Burnell family, who also star in “Prelude” and “The Doll’s House”.

Read “At The Bay” at the Katherine Mansfield Society website.

“At The Bay” is an interesting case study for writers, for so many reasons. Notably:

• The way Mansfield creates her characters in pairs, to compare and contrast them. If one character goes visiting, so does her counterpoint character.
• This is an example of a story in which no one has any big self-revelation. Like Mad Men famously achieved, the characters go about their own lives, continuing to make mistakes, learning little, and that is how life really is. This is the ultimate realism, though it can feel to the reader like ‘nothing happens’. We tend to say of these stories, ‘It’s not got any plot’. Or, it’s an ‘anti-plot’.
• But apart from the lack of growth, “At The Bay” does conform to classic story structure, and even the lack of Self-revelation is replaced by characters who suddenly change their emotional valence, either because they are practising ‘opposite action’ or because they suddenly become scared or whatever.
• Mansfield’s scenes each feel complete in their own right because the emotional valence changes from beginning to end. Linda starts off with no emotional affect, but ends the scene beaming at her baby boy. Beryl starts off scared with Mrs Kembers than feels jubilantly free for a second. Stanley rushes into the water triumphant to be first and is immediately irritated to find he is not first after all. Mansfield’s emotions swing from one extreme to the other. If we find our own scenes emotionally flat, a read of “At The Bay” should set us back on the right track.
• Mansfield also has a real affinity for children. She recreates play scenes and child interactions so authentically, without glossing over the fact that the hierarchy between children can be brutal. There’s nothing mawkish about these children.

Continue reading “At The Bay by Katherine Mansfield”

Katherine Mansfield wrote “Prelude” in 1916 then revised it the following year. “Prelude” is the first in a trilogy of interlinked short stories. The other stories starring the Burnell family are “At the Bay” and “The Doll’s House“. Although “The Doll’s House” is populated by the same characters, the themes and motifs of “At The Bay” are so closely aligned to “Prelude” that these two stories might be considered a diptych. “New Dresses” is thought to have explored an earlier version of the Burnell family dynamics.

For me, “Prelude” is chiefly about all the various ways in which people live in their own fantasy worlds. Each of the characters in this story has a different relationship with reality, whether it’s make-believe games or pranks played by children, a romantic fantasy played out by a young woman, the slightly crazed imaginings of a ‘desperate housewife’, or the delusions of grandeur enjoyed by the man of a busy household.

Read “Prelude” online at The Katherine Mansfield Society.

Plotwise, “Prelude“, stars the Burnell family, who is moving from the city of Wellington into the nearby country. Mansfield’s own family made a similar move when she was a child, perhaps to escape a bacterial infection which was killing lots of people in central Wellington in the late 1800s. She probably drew on memories of that time. Mansfield called her house in central Wellington ‘a horrid little piggy house’. It was small and plain compared to the house they moved into. (If you visit this original house in Wellington today, you may be surprised at how small it is by modern standards.)

Mansfield originally called “Prelude” “The Aloe”. An aloe (which flowers only once every 100 years) makes a symbolic appearance in this short story, as a beech tree is symbolic in “The Escape” and the pear tree is symbolic in “Bliss“.

The aloe plant has a tall, thick, swollen stem with long, sharp thorns.

In this story it has been said to symbolise:

1. Separate things merging together: past and present, Kezia and Linda.
2. Linda’s sexual fears
3. Thorns represent the destructive powers of sex and the dominant role fulfilled by the male head of household.
4. Power (for Linda) to escape (corresponding with money for Beryl)

In her revision, Mansfield also made her plot less ‘obvious’, leaned more heavily on symbolism to suggest and, in short, turned the story into something far more muted than before. Between revisions she had lost her brother in the war. In the revision, Linda is now pregnant with a male child. Some readers have speculated that this is perhaps in honour of Mansfield’s deceased brother.

What Happens In “Prelude”

Continue reading “Prelude by Katherine Mansfield”

“The Voyage” is a short story by Katherine Mansfield, written 1921.

Katherine Mansfield always disliked intellectualism and aestheticism (one thing she had in common with her husband John Middleton Murray). She strove to combine a realist way of writing with personal and relatable symbols.

“The Voyage” is a good example of her philosophy on that. This is one of Katherine Mansfield’s later stories and was published only after her death, in her 1923 collection The Garden Party. (She died in January of that year.) Continue reading “The Voyage by Katherine Mansfield”

“The Fly” is a short story by Katherine Mansfield, published 1922.

Mansfield’s short stories are out of copyright and available at various places online. Download “The Fly”by Katherine Mansfield as a document.

Mansfield wrote “The Fly” in February 1922 as she was finding her TB treatment debilitating. She died in January of  1923, soon after its publication. Thirty-four seems young to be contemplating old age, and to write about elderly character with any sort of gravitas, but it’s likely Mansfield always had empathy for the elderly. It’s likely she knew she would die young. For one thing, she’d faced plague. The Beauchamp family escaped central Wellington to live in Karori, probably to evade the bacterial infections which were highly dangerous to Wellingtonians at the turn of the 20th century. Aside from that, Mansfield grew up with weak lungs. The family doctor told her family (if not Mansfield herself?) that she was a case of tuberculosis waiting to happen. Continue reading “The Fly by Katherine Mansfield”