Miss Mansfield, we in New Zealand have laid proud claim to you because you were born and brought up a New Zealander. Although you spent most of your adult years in England and the Continent, you always looked back to these southern antipodean islands as the main source for your stories. On our part, we have long since acknowledged that New Zealand could not fulfill your expectation of Life, Art, Literature and Experience. The world was waiting in England, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and France.
—Witi Ihimaera, Dear Miss Mansfield: A Tribute to Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp
Desire and Domesticity in the Backwaters of Empire
In Katherine Mansfield’s best-known story, “Prelude,” Stanley Burnell, who has just moved to a new house, is delighted by his new life in the wide-open space of New Zealand countryside: “Ah, it was splendid to live in the country—to get right out of that hole of a town once the office was closed; and this drive in the fresh warm air, knowing all the while that his own house was at the other end, with its garden and paddocks, its three tip-top cows and enough fowls and ducks to keep them in poultry, was splendid too.”1 It is the very same space that drives his sister-in-law, the young, single, and attractive Beryl, into a well of despair:
We have got neighbors, but they are only farmers. … But my sister who lives a mile away doesn’t know a soul here, so I am sure we never shall. It’s pretty certain nobody will ever come out from town to see us. … Such is life. It’s a sad ending for poor little B. I’ll get to be a most awful frump in a year or two and come and see you in a mackintosh and a sailor hat tied on with a white china silk motor veil. So pretty. (117)
To Stanley, on the other hand, country life not only offers immediate pleasures, but more crucially, it is an investor’s paradise. “I’ve got the place dirt cheap,” he says, “You see land about here is bound to become more and more valuable … in about ten years’ time” (89).
In Katherine Mansfield’s fiction, the New Zealand countryside of her childhood becomes many things. Probably captured most memorably in the stories centering on the Burnell family—“Prelude,” “At the Bay,” “The Doll’s House,” “The Little Girl”—they often make up a dreamy, mist-covered natural idyll where the mythical aloe blooms once in a hundred years; to the children, it is a magical and unreal landscape. Nothing stands out more, however, than the vast, bare expanse of this landscape, evoking the Karori countryside to which Mansfield’s own family had moved, away from the city of Wellington, when she was six years old. To Stanley Burnell in “Prelude,” this bare, unclaimed space represents the settler colonial’s dream—“dirt-cheap” land that is bound to rise in value in the coming years. It is a dream, however, that is of no interest to the women in his family. Even as he shares the excitement of his clever real estate investments with his wife Linda, he has to check to see if she is still awake and is in fact listening to his financial success story. Murmuring from a half-dreamy state, Linda calls him “Mr. Business Man,” a name of endearing sarcasm. And Beryl, Linda’s younger sister, writes a letter to her friend Nan Pym, venting her depression and tedium at being trapped in what to her is a vacuous space of utter social barrenness and, eventually, a sexual death. Unlike her entrepreneurial brother-in-law, the blank space of the settler colony represents to her one long stretch of fatal boredom.
When does empire become a space of boredom? When does its infinitely expansive space fail on its promise of romance and drama and become an agoraphobic venue of unrelenting, deadening tedium for the European colonial or settler? Historical and anthropological research, in recent years, have uncovered boredom as the affective consequence of life in the far provinces of the historical British Empire, where the deadening tedium of the everyday contrasts with the social and historical excitement of the imperial metropolis. It is a tedium that betrays the exotic romance of empire as promised by popular fiction and “exhibitions, juvenile literature, music hall entertainment, radio, advertising, film and organizations such as the Boy Scouts.”2 In his essay “Imperial Boredom,” the historian Jeffrey Auerbach chronicles the daily lives of a number of imperial administrators and their wives, including Garnet Wolseley as the governor of Natal; William Denison as governor-general of New South Wales; the marquess of Hastings and Lord Auckland, both as governors of Bengal; and H. G. Keene, as the assistant subcollector in Mathura, to reveal the oppressive banalization of their daily lives. Auerbach provides a perceptive diagnosis of this imperial boredom: “The boredom that nineteenth-century colonial officials experienced was largely the product of unmet expectations about the landscape, combined with the increasingly bureaucratic and ceremonial nature of imperial service.”3 While reality was ill served by the imagination of popular culture, the burden of boredom was also accentuated by the sense of social and cultural marginality embodied in these provincial spaces. In other words, while haunted by the unrealized specter of imperial adventure, the colonial administrators and their families also suffered from the kind of vacuousness experienced by Beryl in the wide-open New Zealand country, the boredom bred in the backwaters of empire. And how very ironically so—just when they should in fact be defined by the excitement represented by Stanley Burnell and his lust for wide-open colonial land!
As a member of the settler colonial population and, significantly, as a woman, Beryl, however, suffers alienation and disempowerment far more intense and pervasive than the bored colonial administrators of the British Empire. Her boredom with life in what appears to be the provincial backwaters of Karori is an affective index of her social and sexual isolation, from where the socioeconomic affluence of the metropolitan heart of empire, England, and even its colonial incarnation in regional government seems to contain the objects of impossible desire: “A young man, immensely rich, has just arrived from England. He meets her quite by chance. … The new governor is unmarried. … There is a ball at Government house. … Who is that exquisite creature in eau de nil satin? Beryl Fairfield” (“Prelude,” 89).
The white settler colonial community, Robert Young points out, occupies an ambiguous historical space. Named the “in-between class” by Young,4 their racial and cultural moorings derive from the imperial society that governs the colony from Europe. They claim ideological affiliations with the metropolitan center of empire, avowing careful distance from the indigenous peoples of the colony with whom they often have—as in colonial New Zealand—a history of violent conflict. At the same time, they are a colonial population, often ridden with the anxiety of living on the margins of modernity, of the perpetual fear of being left behind, of being excluded from the excitement of metropolitan power and affluence. Dreaming of this empire, its economic and political might as romanticized in the figure of the wealthy young man just arrived from England, Beryl Fairfield is dejected at the thought of vegetating in the provincial tedium around her.5
Beryl, no doubt, remains a partly parodied figure, a receptacle of a fractured authorial sympathy. But she serves a crucial purpose in Mansfield’s New Zealand bildungsroman, made up by stories about the Burnell family. Shaped by her despair, restlessness, and boredom in the social wilderness of the country, Beryl embodies a gendered critique of the masculinized ambitions of settler colonialism and its fantasy of open, unclaimed space as territory prime for economic investment. To the settler colonial woman, especially if she is young, with unrealized social, cultural, and romantic ambitions, the masculine dream of expanding into undiscovered country opens up a world not of imperial adventure and romance but of unrelieved, agoraphobic boredom. If the masculine imagination of the settler colonial fantasy is centrifugal, the feminine imaginary reveals itself to be centripetal. Driven to tedium by the blank open spaces of the colonial territory, the feminine imagination seeks instead the promise of social and cultural modernity embodied in the metropolitan center of empire. As a larger phenomenon, the centripetal desire of colonial modernity is scarcely gendered—the fractured relation this modernity has to its imperial ideal is a historical reality that encompasses both men and women. Mansfield’s stories, however, reveal a gendered fissure in the settler colonial imaginary, one made obvious and immediate in Stanley and Beryl’s respective responses to the family’s move to the country. Beryl, in fact, is a less than sympathetic characterization of the anxieties that preoccupy many of Mansfield’s female protagonists and characters and, indeed, of the author herself, whose life was marked by a ceaseless movement between the margin and the center, between the colonial backwaters of suburban Wellington to the heart of the metropolitan avant-garde in Bloomsbury.
The landscape of the New Zealand countryside of her childhood comes back as a natural idyll of magical possibilities in Mansfield’s best stories, those published in the last few years of her life. The magic of this natural landscape, however, is far more alive to the children than to the adults. Grown women suffer more ambiguous fates in Mansfield’s world. Often they seem locked in a failing quest for a life that is socially, conjugally, or aesthetically fulfilling. One of the most pervasive affective markers of this failure is a realization of the iterative, restrictive banality of their lives and the boredom that comes with it—to which one must eventually surrender. This boredom marks a gendered response to the perceived fracture of colonial modernity as it exists, hesitant and incomplete, on the antipodean margins of the British Empire. The possibility of a fuller, richer, and aesthetically meaningful life, which haunts many of Mansfield’s characters—and, curiously, provides the narrative entropy to much of her fiction—is enabled by the shadow of a fuller life that is visible in fragments from the margins but that will always remain outside the sensual reach of the colonial subject. Even the calm texture of quotidian domesticity that makes up a significant part of her fictional world is molded by the replication of metropolitan social values and norms in the colony. The colonial writer who had so eagerly desired and gained entry into Bloomsbury but was simultaneously derided for her colonial origins offers telling stories of futility, restlessness, and emptiness, of a world where such desires are teased but never satisfactorily fulfilled. Beryl Fairfield only represents the most obvious—and scarcely the most sympathetic—of the fractured quests of a fuller life outside one’s reach. Mansfield’s fiction is pervaded by this aesthetic unfulfillment, which casts a shadow even on the stories that do not have a recognizably colonial setting. This unfulfillment, and the tedium that is its bitter fruit, provides the larger affective context to Mansfield’s oeuvre.
Many of these desires, and the story of their frustration, can be traced to Mansfield’s personal biography. If, with the Irish modernists, the fervent cultural nationalism of anticolonial struggle led to an erosion of colonial desire, for the upper-middle-class white settler community in New Zealand, this desire for the imperial metropolis was far more intense and pervasive, as this community fervently traced its ideological underpinnings to England and to the British Empire. New Zealand in the nineteenth century, as Claire Tomalin points out in her biography of Mansfield, was on the margin of empire in the most extreme sense. It was for many a colony of Australia in the way that Australia was a colony of England, “the very last place, the furthest you could go, the end of the line.”6 If Ireland’s physical proximity to England and continental Europe ironized its cultural marginalization, for the white settlers in New Zealand, the twelve thousand miles that separated them from their “home” pushed them to do their best to offset the “alien” local landscape by investing it with all they could associate with England, a place that many had never seen. “The wooden bungalows, the municipal buildings,” writes Tomalin, “the schools and shops were built to match English mid-Victorian buildings.”7 The ideological power of this yearning for the imperial metropole was powerful enough to shape the consciousness of natives assimilated into the colonial mainstream, as it is evoked by Witi Ihimaera in Dear Miss Mansfield, the Māori writer’s tribute to his Pākehā predecessor:
The London that was waiting for Mahaki and Susan had been the capital of a colonial empire and was now the mother to the Commonwealth. It was Britannia and, under an earlier Queen, had sent out English settlers to a land far to the south—New Zealand. There, in uneasy alliance with the natives, and perhaps because of the natives, the colonists had established a new England. But life, legislation, traditions and culture were still determined from the place of satanic mills. It was to be expected that at least once in their lives most New Zealanders should visit the Home Country and, if possible, attend the new Elizabeth at the Court of St. James.8
Katherine’s grandfather, Arthur Beauchamp, migrated from England to New Zealand, eventually attaining prosperity there as a merchant after a failed attempt as a prospector in the goldfields of Australia. His son, Harold, rose to success rapidly when his time came, ultimately becoming the chairman of the Bank of New Zealand and a prominent member of the settler community in Wellington. Knighted later in life, Harold Beauchamp epitomized the successful colonial merchant not only in his professional career but also in spirit—in his complete identification with England and all things English. When Anthony Trollope visited New Zealand in the 1870s, when Harold was a boy, he noted Harold’s conviction “that England is the best place in the world and he is more English than any Englishman.”9 Harold traveled to England as soon as he was able to, and, as Tomalin points out, the very first trip was made in 1889, “a year after the birth of his third daughter, Katherine.”10 It was this tradition of Anglophilia in which Katherine was born and raised and that shaped her own yearning to be part of a metropolitan European modernism. But even though she would subsequently come to be incorporated as part of the English modernist canon, during her lifetime, her colonial origins would never cease to shadow her sense of personal identity:
I am the little colonial walking in a London garden patch—allowed to look perhaps, but not to linger. If I lie on the grass, they positively shout at me: “Look at her, lying on our grass, pretending she lives here, pretending this is her garden, and that tall back of a house, with windows open and the coloured curtains lifting, in her house. She is a stranger—an alien. She is nothing but a little girl sitting on the Tinakori hills and dreaming: ‘I went to London and married an Englishman and we lived in a tall grave house, with red geraniums and white daisies in the garden at the back.’”11
Biographical sources have convincingly established Katherine Mansfield’s troubled status within the Bloomsbury circle as much as it has revealed her sense of discontent and inadequacy in what seemed to her the colonial backwaters of New Zealand. Such feelings were exacerbated after her return home after her first few years in England, an experience that doubtless shaped her decision to live in England and continental Europe for almost the entirety of her adult life. Critical, biographical, and editorial interventions have also tended to emphasize Mansfield’s relationship with and place within metropolitan European culture and have diminished the sense of personal importance that her colonial home had for her.
Even so, most of her best work, especially the late stories, have colonial settings. Much of her fiction set in Europe also strongly echoes the ambience and landscape of colonial New Zealand, as in the early collection In a German Pension. It is especially in light of these facts that a significant lacuna in Mansfield studies becomes glaring, one that has recently begun to be addressed by scholars such as Mark Williams, Bridget Orr, Ian Gordon, Lydia Wevers, and Elleke Boehmer. This is the issue of her relationship with the colonial history and landscape of her native country, doubly complicated by her own attachments to metropolitan Europe and her ambiguous distance from her country of origin. Traditional Anglo-American criticism has tended, often rather simplistically, to construct a “European” Mansfield with little or no relationship to her colonial roots. Such critical trends were partly set in motion by her husband John Middleton Murry not only in his commentary on her work but through his highly selective editing of her writings, especially her diaries and notebooks, which are only now beginning to undergo restoration. The colonial implications of her writings have also generally been ignored by criticism that has otherwise provided valuable insights into the radical dimensions of Mansfield’s work with respect to gender and sexuality, such as seminal studies by Kate Fullbrook, Claire Hanson, and Sydney Janet Kaplan, and the biography by Claire Tomalin.12
Ironically, as Bridget Orr points out, even when Mansfield’s work has been read in the context of its New Zealand setting, as in fact was done in an earlier approach by C. K. Stead, it has relied upon a simple binary. In this construction, the raw colonial elements of her work are seen as occupying a negligible and marginal portion of her oeuvre, while her true aesthetic complexity is understood to emerge in contexts that are either European or colonial settings domesticated and diluted to the point where they become weak versions of middle-and upper-middle-class English society.13 Stead thus minimizes the importance of New Zealand, even in the few Mansfield stories where he acknowledges a distinctively colonial setting, reading them as minor distractions from Mansfield’s genuine—and resolutely European—aesthetic vocation. The more subtle interplays of race and colonial class relations that are at work in some of Mansfield’s most significant stories, Orr argues, are ignored by Stead, for whom the picture of New Zealand reality can only be captured by regional realism in the manner of the short-story writer Frank Sargeson. “Such an assumption,” Orr writes, “installs Sargeson as the true father of New Zealand letters, and Mansfield’s production of regional texts is seen as proleptic only, a false start—she ‘anticipated’ or ‘foreshadowed’ a whole genre of New Zealand fiction but the true origin, oddly enough, comes later.”14
My reading of boredom as a colonial condition in Mansfield’s stories builds upon the approaches opened up by Orr, Wevers, Gordon, and Williams. Mansfield’s understated relationship with the landscape of New Zealand is as important to my approach as is her insistent disavowal of her colonial roots and subsequent identification with English culture. This relation with colonial history and landscape, often expressed through allegory or metonymy, extends not only to the complexities of the English settler society but occasionally even to the influence of Māori culture, people, and history, with which settler colonialism had been locked in a deeply troubled relationship. Overlooked points of Mansfield’s relationship to the culture of her birthplace include accounts of her travels through New Zealand countryside in her notebooks as well as her abandoned novel Maata, centering on Martha Grace Mahapuku, a theme that the Māori writer Witi Ihimaera takes up in his collection addressed to Mansfield.
Mansfield’s stories, often thought of as psychological sketches, have a tonal and textural ambivalence that draws from a play of desire, distaste, longing, and disillusionment that shaped her back-and-forth movement between New Zealand and Europe. Colonial subordination to metropolitan modernity, in this worldview, is further aggravated by a feminine discontent with the centrifugal instincts of a masculinist settler colonial imagination that seeks to expand to the furthest spatial limits of the colony. The very tangible fabric of banality in her stories reveals more about the perturbed colonial history from which they consciously distance themselves than one might identify superficially. From underneath this sanitized, quiet, and uneventful surface, the feminized upper-middle-class domesticity in Mansfield’s stories forms a quiet dialectic with the promise of trauma and violence lurking within colonial and indigenous landscapes. Such violence is literalized only occasionally, but even when it is not brought to surface, it forms a silent undertow in the ambience of her fiction.
Between “Māoritanga” and White Modernism: Colonial Ethnology and The Urewera Notebook
The narratives of modernity and colonialism in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century New Zealand were replete with violence and conflict between Māori and Pākehā—the indigenous tribes and the European settlers, as they are known in the Māori language (and in New Zealand English), respectively.15 The confusion perpetrated by the Pākehā over the deceptively worded Treaty of Waitangi of 1840 stands as both the epistemological culmination of this conflict and as its textualized metaphor. Such conflicts have left lasting marks on turn-of-the-century colonial and settler writing as much as on Māori literature later into the twentieth century, as evident in the tension between European and indigenous forms of modernism that mark both traditions of literature.
Bridget Orr convincingly accounts for the way modern New Zealand literature has evolved from the colonial stereotypes of the nineteenth century to the celebration of regional identities and cultures in the twentieth century.16According to her, turn-of-the-century women writers like Katherine Mansfield and Jane Mander were among the first to help this literature move beyond simplified colonial romance and comedy by introducing a “distinctly female perspective.” Nationalism, however, does not stir the Pākehā literary imagination until the 1930s, when writers like Frank Sargeson and Robin Hyde begin to adopt authentic modes of regional realism. Pākehā writers continued to dominate the literary scene through the 1950s and 1960s, mostly through large-scale family dramas of provincial life and historical novels. But it wasn’t until the 1970s that real change came about in the relative cultural homogeneity of New Zealand literature, with the emergence of the Māori Renaissance in New Zealand literature.
Katherine Mansfield occupies a critical position in this literature not only because of her pioneering role in the development of New Zealand’s literary identity but also with regard to questions of legacy and canonization. European high modernism eventually overcame perceptions of “the little colonial” to integrate Mansfield’s place within its metropolitan canons. Specifically, she is now acknowledged as a member of the Bloomsbury group and, in the light of her literary aesthetic and authorial worldview, is often mentioned in the same breath as other major female modernists such as Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, and Elizabeth Bowen. On the other hand, Māori writers of the latter decades of the twentieth century have traced significant parts of their legacies from Mansfield, consequently casting her in the light of “Māoritanga,” or Māori-ness. The most prominent of these claims on Mansfield’s legacy has been Witi Ihimaera’s Dear Miss Mansfield, a collection of short fiction that responds to Mansfield’s writing, offering new perspectives on her relation with Māori culture. The Māori protagonist of Ihimaera’s novella “Maata,” Mahaki, somewhat ironically shares much of the author’s fascination with Mansfield, significant aspects of which are summarized in his “Letter” to Dear Miss Mansfield:
Miss Mansfield, we in New Zealand have laid proud claim to you because you were born and brought up a New Zealander. Although you spent most of your adult years in England and the Continent, you always looked back to these southern antipodean islands as the main source for your stories. On our part, we have long since acknowledged that New Zealand could not fulfill your expectation of Life, Art, Literature and Experience. The world was waiting in England, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and France.17
Even though Mansfield has occasionally suffered from the perception of her being a minor writer in the context of British and European modernism, she has been long considered a major writer in New Zealand by Pākehā and Māori writers alike. Reading her stories with this awareness, we can identify two significant places where we can reassess her relation with colonial, especially indigenous, cultures: her reception by later Māori writers and her own documentation of her relationship with indigenous cultures and landscapes.
Specifically, I argue for a reading of Mansfield’s fiction and nonfiction based on the complex and often-contradictory realities of white settler colonial society and the more distant but looming landscape of Māori culture and history. It is an intriguing relationship between two very different forms of colonialism existing in an explosive contact zone. In Mansfield’s stories, this contact is often dictated by the pivotal performance of gender. Gender enacts the distinction of private and public spaces and accordingly marks a rift over the expansionist ambitions of settler colonialism. While Mansfield’s location within the domestic world of settler society has been obvious, her relationship with the world of indigenous culture has only just begun to be addressed.
The most concrete evidence of Mansfield’s interaction with Māori culture is contained in her notebooks chronicling her travels through the New Zealand countryside. Many of the significant aspects of her New Zealand stories, including the depiction of specific settings, mood, and characterization, are derived from entries in her travel notebooks. The route through which she processed her relationship with Māori culture becomes clear, therefore, if we read her notebooks and her stories together. This relationship is marked by a tension between the idyllic and romantic picture of Māori culture painted by turn-of-the-century ethnology and the colonial violence to which such cultures were subjected. The genocide and trauma that were a part of Māori history under British domination was, in fact, not too remote from Mansfield’s own time. Mansfield’s journal entries record her closest contacts with Māori cultural and historical landscapes, most significantly those in The Urewera Notebook, which is her account of her camping trip through Urewera country at the age of nineteen.
As Mark Williams has pointed out, Mansfield passed through Te Whaiti in 1907, where a few years earlier there had been a government store run by the ethnographer Elsdon Best, who went on to write several monographs promulgating a romanticized account of Māori culture. A reading of some of Best’s surviving works helps us, in the first place, to locate him in the Frazerian tradition of turn-of-the-century anthropology, in which human cultures and civilizations are placed in global hierarchies of value and progress. Such subjective evaluations seep through Best’s descriptions and analyses in works like The Māori as He Was and Spiritual and Mental Concepts of the Māori, as, for instance, when Best writes about Māori religious ideals: “a barbaric folk such as the Māori is usually much more religious than are peoples of a higher culture stage—than ourselves, for example.”18 But while such hierarchies are validated within the parameters of rationality, they are also complicated within a system of abstracted spiritual values: “It is for us to read the lesson contained in these beliefs and conclusions of man the barbarian. It is for us to retrace our steps down the path of intolerance, and regain the broad highways of altruism—to tread the four-way path of Tane over which, from all quarters of the fair earth, the souls of dead fare on to Hawaiki-nui, the domain of purification.”19 Best’s ethnographic account of the Māori as a significant cultural “Other” in colonial New Zealand forms part of the contemporary European anthropological projects that crucially shaped the intellectual climate of modernism, as is also evident in the writings of Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Bronislaw Malinowski. In spite of its location within this larger intellectual tradition, there is little doubt that the ideological underpinning of an anthropological project such as Best’s had more in common with James Frazer’s evolutionary comparativism than any other model of anthropological knowledge production contemporaneous with literary modernism. Specifically, Best’s approach to culture clearly belonged to the late-nineteenth-century episteme where, as James Clifford points out, “culture was still generally thought of in the singular” and that assumed that “people had higher or lower degrees of culture.”20 That later in the twentieth century Pākehā critics would often read Māori writing primarily as a form of ethnographic discourse becomes something of a literary-critical counterpart to this phenomenon.
What is also striking is that Best’s idyllic portrayals contain no hint of colonial violence, especially the bloody conflicts over road surveys between the European and the Tuhoe people in 1895, which left their lasting mark on the Ureweras, where Best had his store and through which Mansfield passed in 1907. This was, as Ian Gordon describes it, “the great pumice plain between Rangitaiki and the Waipunga River.”21 In The Urewera Notebook, Mansfield’s entries often reflect a perception of the romance and beauty of Māori life and people: “There is one great fellow I see—who speaks English—black curls clustering round his broad brow—rest almost languor in his black eyes—a slouching walk and yet slumbers in his face passion might and strength.” A historical awareness of Māori anger and the marks of trauma and violence, on the other hand, intrudes far less often, only in the occasional passage, as for instance in her description of Opipi: “at last we come on Opipi—the scene of a most horrible massacre—only 2 men were saved.” Again, she writes about another camping site where, in 1866, a conflict between British forces led by Major Fraser and the Māori had left most of the Māori combatants dead: “Round us in the darkness the horses were moving softly with a most eerie sound—visions of long dead Māoris—of forgotten battles and vanished feuds—stirred in me.”22
Mansfield’s awareness of the indigenous historical, cultural, and demographic landscape was largely a reflection of the calm, idyllic, and picturesque version propagated by turn-of-the-century colonial ethnology, such as that exemplified by the work of Elsdon Best. Only at the rarest of moments is this version intruded upon by the darker knowledge of colonial violence, as for instance in this passage early on in the notebook, which evokes a surrealist aesthetic: “Everywhere on the hills great masses of charred logs—looking for all the world like strange fantastic beasts, a yawning crocodile, a headless horse, a gigantic gosling, a watchdog—to be smiled at and scorned in the daylight, but a veritable nightmare in the darkness. And now and again the silver tree trunks, like a skeleton army, invade the hills.”23
The surreal nightmare promised by this landscape cannot be too distant from the submerged historical reality behind this world. This is the reality of violent conflict that has shaped the structure and trajectory of white colonial society. Like surrealism, this reality is caught in a muted tension with the calm and idyllic picture of indigenous society painted by colonial anthropology. Literary modernism shared with turn-of-the-century anthropology a crucial climate of disciplinary development, where the latter was undergoing significant methodological and ideological changes that would eventually shape the discipline that we recognize today. Katherine Mansfield, while predominantly deriving her worldview from the older model of anthropological epistemology, also seems to be positioned at this moment of disciplinary transition.
This subdued tension is an important key to reading her short fiction. In the following pages, I explore the way in which Mansfield’s stories metaphorically and metonymically refract her broader imagination of the colonial landscape. This incorporates the colonial English middle- and upper-middle-class world-view, including not only its intricate social fabric, its repetitive, predictable, and restrictive routine, but also the historical shadows of disorder and violence lurking close by. As a characterological presence, the Māori remain marginal in her fiction, appearing on the rarest of occasions as shadowy, romanticized figures. The lingering threat of violence that haunts many of her stories and erupts directly in a few derives almost exclusively from the dark underclass of the white settler population let loose in the colonial wilderness. Runaways, convicts, prisoners, and murderers inhabit this space, worlds apart from the still and tepid domesticity of the world of garden parties. It is an atmosphere of anarchic disorder that makes for a stark contrast to the economic pragmatism of Stanley Burnell, to whom the open space represents an investment opportunity, or to the restless Beryl, for whom it evokes nothing but boredom and social isolation. The haunting nature of this colonial violence reveals itself, however, only as a shadow of the oppressive, iterative everyday that appears to make up the central fabric of Mansfield’s fiction.
“Why Must You Suffer So?”: Colonial Desire and Female Tedium
The dominant atmosphere of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories, based on middle- and upper-middle-class lives, is usually constituted by a quiet, quotidian domesticity, which is a common precondition of the lives of her female characters. This atmosphere of domesticity ranges from the dreamily idyllic to the drearily monotonous. This is the defining quality of the lives of the confined housewife Millie in the story “Millie”; the children Kezia, Lottie, and Isabel and their young aunt Beryl in “Prelude”;24 the quiet, routine-encased everyday experiences of Miss Brill in the story “Miss Brill”; and the middle-aged unmarried daughters of the dead colonel in “Daughters of the Late Colonel.” This gendered tedium pervades Mansfield’s colonial and British/European stories alike.
A gendered relationship between domesticity and boredom has been identified as a significant component of the worldview of English prose fiction from its very beginnings. Patricia Meyer Spacks argues that the boredom that pervaded the lives of middle- and upper-middle-class women in eighteenth-century England and often found creative manifestation in women’s literature was a consequence of the web of limitations imposed by patriarchal society on female lives. The dialectic of boredom and anguish that shaped such lives provided narrative impetus to works of “intelligible social protest.”25 Carefully distinguishing such boredom from the grander trope canonized in literature and philosophy—“ennui”—Spacks points to the very concrete, historically located material politics behind the force and pressure of such “gendered” boredom:
The boredom to which women are destined, according to conduct books by men and women alike as well as women’s novels, is not a condition of the soul. … The boredom of women, as it emerges in these texts, constitutes an imposition of intricate social pressure: pressure to conform to the rules that forbid free choice or action, and pressure to deny their conceivable understanding of their relatively inactive lives as tedious. Narratives of female misery, however fantastic, reveal resentment of such imposition.26
The lives of Katherine Mansfield’s female protagonists can be located within similar traditions of patriarchal control. Many of Mansfield’s female characters, for instance, appear trapped within the cycle of what Hannah Arendt calls labor. Labor, for Arendt, is the activity of the vita activa that is essential to the daily, biological sustenance of the body but which leaves no trace or impact beyond its immediate context, as opposed to action, through which individuals express their personalities and form sustainable relationships with the public realm. Labor, on the other hand, was originally confined to the household sphere.27 The oppressive tedium and gritty materiality of this quotidian labor absorb many of Mansfield’s female characters. The nature of their absorption in this labor varies according to class. “Life of Ma Parker,” for instance, reveals the very bottom rung of this labor in Mansfield’s world; it foregrounds the Sisyphean life of an old woman who works as a cleaning lady, performing part of the labor of others’ lives to make her own living. And it is labor that is presented to the reader as dreary, depressing, and ugly, though it seems unlikely that Ma Parker thinks of it as such. The particular home where she works in this story belongs to a character identified only as “the literary gentleman”; it is an identification that foregrounds the Arendtian duality of labor and action. Identified only in terms of the action through which he seeks to articulate his individuality in the public realm, the literary gentleman outsources the dirty business of labor—cleaning and housekeeping—to “a hag,” maintaining what to him is a simple system: “You simply dirty everything you’ve got, get a hag in once a week to clean up, and the thing’s done” (251).
In Mansfield’s world, characters like the literary gentleman offer ripe material for satire. In fact, reading her stories, it is impossible not to wonder at the biting negativity around almost all the characters identified as writers, artists, and musicians. This might come across as surprising in the work of a writer who lived most of her life and crafted her work in the celebrated artistic milieus of European modernism. Some of it, however, might be explained by Mansfield’s marginal status within that milieu and the coldness and hostility she occasionally experienced there as a writer from a distant, antipodean colony. But I believe that this insistent satire is, most significantly, directed against the pretentious position that art is always in danger of assuming, a position of detachment from and transcendence beyond the tedious and gritty business of life’s daily sustenance. Art that seeks to elevate itself above the banality of this sustenance, that wishes to keep itself clean of the “toast crusts, envelopes, cigarette ends” (251) will not escape Mansfield’s satire. If class bears the burden of this gritty labor in “Life of Ma Parker,” in “Mr Reginald Peacock’s Day,” the weight of daily drudgery is borne by marriage. Reginald Peacock is the vain and selfish music teacher who spends his day in an eroticized fantasy of his imagined artistic excellence (as it is with most of these satirized figures, there is little actual evidence of any kind of real talent). His day is filled with the daily music lessons he offers to admiring young women and is punctuated by outbursts of disgust and hostility for his wife, who has to interrupt his lessons to ask for money to buy milk for their son.
The literary gentleman is further damned by the affectionate sympathy of Ma Parker, whose perspective frames her story. “But Ma Parker bore him no grudge. She pitied the poor young gentleman for having no young to look after him” (251). Reginald Peacock needs no help from others; his own point of view, dripping with a sexualized artistic vanity, gives him away. He is a poster boy for the distaste that bohemian artistry professes for what it sees as the unregenerate banality of domestic life, its restrictive chores and obligations. His distaste, moreover, glares with misogyny: “The truth was that once you married a woman she became insatiable, and the truth was that nothing was more fatal for an artist than marriage” (121). A ludicrous vanity shapes his own perception of himself as defined by a poetic naïveté about the burdensome prose of the world: “Looking back, he saw a pathetic, youthful creature, half child, half wild untamed bird, totally incompetent to cope with bills and creditors and all the sordid details of existence” (121).
Women caught in the banality of this daily labor, in Mansfield’s fiction, often live far apart from the world of aesthetic glory and its iconic paradigms. Ma Parker was born in Stratford-on-Avon, yet she had never heard the name of Shakespeare till she came to London. “Yes, she was born in Stratford-on-Avon. Shakespeare, sir? No, people were always arsking her about him. But she’d never heard his name until she saw it on the theatres” (252). Stratford, to her, meant nothing but a comforting memory of the quotidian, shaped by the labor of her own mother: “Nothing remained of Stratford except that ‘sitting in the fireplace of a evening you could see the stars through the chimley,’ and ‘Mother always ’ad ’er side of bacon, ’anging from the ceiling’” (252). The most ironic encounter between literary romance and the prosaic reality of work happens over the literary gentleman’s remarks upon hearing that Ma Parker’s late husband had been a baker. To the gentleman, who knows the working-class professions merely through mediocre literary clichés, baking is “such a clean trade” (252). “And didn’t you,” he asks, “like handing the new loaves to the customers?” (252). Ma Parker had neither the mindset nor the luxury to aestheticize her husband’s work, preoccupied as she was with her own daily labor, often literally that of birth: “I wasn’t in the shop a great deal. We had thirteen little ones and buried seven of them. If it wasn’t the ’ospital it was the infirmary, you might say!” (252). Hearing this, the literary gentleman can only shudder in horror, “taking up his pen again,” returning to the sanitized aesthetic of his privileged pursuit. Ma Parker is left with the memory of her husband dying of consumption, with “flour on the lungs,” as “the doctor told her at the time,” the result of the daily pollution of his body by what literary cliché imagines to be “a clean trade” (252).
Mansfield, in these stories, is a fierce parodist of the pretensions of transcendence that art is capable of making over the banality of labor. Tentative whisperings of imagination, such as those often associated with children in her work, obtain a far richer sympathy in Mansfield’s vision than the conscious rituals of artistic life. She seems keenly aware, moreover, that this ritualized life of the arts is likely to be embedded within a masculine subjectivity, that the banal labor needed to clean the debris of everyday life is far more likely to be left to women. Her aesthetic vision remains firmly rooted in this labor, and it is the banality of this labor that provides narrative energy to her fiction. Often this entropy is generated through the scathing edge of satire.
Ma Parker and Reginald Peacock’s wife, however, are not the kind of women who script a conscious quest for aesthetic fulfillment that lies beyond the weight of their quotidian labor. Reginald Peacock’s wife comes across as silent and embittered; her husband’s deeply narcissistic perspective, which frames the story, refuses her voice or agency beyond fragments of such quiet bitterness. Ma Parker, on the other hand, has so deeply internalized the endless Sisyphean tragedy of her life through her patient and absorbent humanity that she cannot imagine looking for a real change to this life, only a quiet place where she can hide herself and “where she could have her cry out—at last?” (256)—a place, she realizes, that does not exist for her. But there are other women in Mansfield’s fiction who are weighed down not so much by the Arendtian burden of daily labor but by the oppressive tedium of an everyday that limits freedom to choose their lifestyle or the ability to form meaningful relationships with other people. While none of them are trapped in a life as punishing as Ma Parker’s, a range of Mansfield’s female characters are still imprisoned in a vacuous tedium from which they all seek various forms of aesthetic, social, and sexual meaning. Giorgio Agamben reads the bored subject as a captive who is suspended from all possibilities of free choice, without control of circumstances; all of these women lead lives that are imprisoned by time and space, both of which, particularly in settler colonial contexts, appear prolonged and expanded beyond measure.28 In stories like “Miss Brill,” “Millie,” and “Prelude,” women are only too conscious, often painfully so, of their entrapment within lives defined by severe aesthetic and affective poverty. As such, these stories, wholly or in part, are driven by the quest for affective and aesthetic meaning. What makes for a meaningful life? is the urgent question that lies behind most of her stories, a question that she frames most powerfully in terms of women’s experience. Like the significant ellipses that often mark human exchange and interaction in Mansfield’s stories, this question looms large and heavy; no possible answer to it seems reachable. In the end, it is the question and the lacuna around it that shapes her stories.
Few lives in these stories are more telling that of Miss Brill, in the story named after her. Miss Brill’s weekly highlight is her little Sunday outing, where she watches the afternoon crowd and the band playing in the park. She is timid, in need of continuous self-assurance that she is partaking in a reality that is interesting, even enthralling, while sustaining herself on other people’s conversation, on which she eavesdrops greedily: “Miss Brill always looked forward to the conversation. She had become really quite expert, she thought, at listening as though she didn’t listen, at sitting at other people’s lives just for a minute while they talked round her.” It was disappointing when people did not speak, but “there was always the crowd to watch” (226). Watching becomes enthralling enough for the scene to take on the dimensions of the theater, though one suspects that what makes the experience enthralling is not so much what she sees but a desperate internal need to convince herself that she’s indeed having an enthralling experience: “Oh, how fascinating it was! How she enjoyed it! How she loved sitting here, watching it all! It was like a play. It was exactly like a play. Who could believe the sky at the back wasn’t painted? … They were all on the stage. They weren’t only the audience, not only looking on; they were acting” (227).
In a moment, she goes from being an observer of this wonderful theater to one of its participants, an actress herself. The transformation merely ironizes the obvious but unmentionable backdrop of the story—the sterile dullness of Miss Brill’s life, of which this Sunday spectacle was the weekly highlight. “Even she had a part and came every Sunday … she was part of the performance after all. … Yes, I have been an actress for a long time” (227–228). She is driven by an intense need to participate in the imagined excitement of other people’s lives, but she can imagine doing so only through the framework of a theatrical spectacle. Such an imagination accentuates not only the banality of her own life but also a sense of her own utter marginality to the (supposedly) exciting lives of others, in which she can only participate through this imaginary framework. Her fear of her own marginality is well founded; this particular Sunday afternoon comes to a crushing end as she listens eagerly to an attractive young couple, in her imagination “the hero and the heroine,” only to realize their disgust for her: “Why does she come here at all—who wants her? Why doesn’t she keep her silly old mug at home?” (228). The theater that she anxiously seeks to enter is repelled by her; its protagonists think she belongs to the tedium of her home, which is exactly what she is anxious to escape.
But in Mansfield’s world of female boredom, youth breeds its own frustrations, as we see in Beryl’s sense of frustration and futility about her own life. If the lack of the beauty of youth deprives Miss Brill a place in the theater of life’s excitement, for Beryl, youth and beauty ironize, deepen, and in some ways precipitate the intensity of her plight. Since the settler society primarily shapes the arcs of women’s lives in terms of marriage and defines its success according to the social yardsticks of marital success, in spite of being young, spirited, and beautiful, and perhaps more so because of it, Beryl has a more deeply oppressing sense of the banality of her own life. Beryl’s social and romantic desires, of course, center not only on the social excitement of the city that is an “awful” bus ride away but gravitate toward the ultimate object of white settler fantasy—England: the metropolitan center of empire. Beryl, as such, emerges as situated despairingly in a material and ideological network that is structured around male leadership of the immediate family, the social and commercial ambitions of the settler colonial enterprise, and, in the final instance, the economic and political might of the imperial center.
Spacks delineates a close relationship between boredom and psychosis in female life. Middle- and upper-middle-class women in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century England and America were often subjected to mind-numbing regimes of medical surveillance and control, and these have been acutely analyzed by Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian studies of discipline, authority, and domination.29 While there is no specific medical surveillance that proscribes the movements and actions of Mansfield’s numerous female protagonists, the structures, ideologies, and the economies of society push them into deeply constricted spaces. The striking affinity between the world-view of Mansfield’s stories and early English fiction on the subject of female constriction and disempowerment in turn can be traced to the peculiar socio-psychological constitution of the English settler colony. Specifically, such an affinity speaks to the cultivation of norms that are perceived as defining the social fabric of the imperial metropolis. The predicament of these female characters, along with several other behavior patterns, social institutions, customs, and habits, indicates a replication of English social and ideological structures in the colonial peripheries. The colonial replication of metropolitan values, therefore, not only introduces the sense of lack and frustration characteristic of the lives of middle- and upper-middle-class English women into the lives of their New Zealand counterparts but also reveals the fixation of a collective gaze on the social structures of the metropolitan heart of empire.
Rupturing the Quotidian
In “Millie,” an ironic tribute to this object of settler colonial desire is crystallized in the colored print on Millie’s bedroom wall, titled “Garden Party at the Windsor Castle”: “In the foreground emerald lawns planted with immense oak trees, and in their grateful shade, a muddle of ladies and gentlemen and parasols and little tables. The background was filled with towers of Windsor Castle, flying three Union Jacks, and in the middle of the picture the old Queen, like a tea cosy with a head on top of it” (25). The tribute is ironized by Millie’s irreverence: “Millie stared at the flowery ladies, who simpered back at her. ‘I wouldn’t care for that sort of thing. Too much side. What with the Queen an’ one thing an’ another’” (25). To her, the Queen appears as “a tea cosy with a head on top of it.” But her personal mockery of the ideal object of settler desire hardly renders her free of a larger social structure that is shaped by this very desire, even though she inhabits a space far apart from the middle-class world of the Burnells and the Sheridans. She finds the picture a little absurd, a little distasteful, but still it is the overarching presence in her own bedroom. She is confined within a social fabric that models itself on imperial social norms—specifically, within the feminized space of its interior, with the literal unveiling of which the story begins: “Millie stood leaning against the veranda until the men were out of sight” (24). The defining characteristic of this space that Millie inhabits is the overarching sense of confinement, repetitiveness, and boredom against which the protagonist is left to struggle. There is a certain vacuum in the quality of Millie’s life; time here appears to be repetitive: “And then she sat, quiet, thinking of nothing at all, her red swollen hands rolled in her apron, her feet stuck out in front of her, her little head with the thick screw of dark hair, drooped on her chest. ‘Tick-tick’ went the kitchen clock, the ashes clinked in the grate, and the venetian blind knocked against the kitchen window” (25).
But this is only the first half of “Millie.” We soon realize the fragility of the domestic interior enabled by the social structures of settler colonialism. The feminized tedium of this interior is intruded upon by violence in a masculinized external landscape that, as Ian Gordon notes, is significantly derived from The Urewera Notebook. Drawn by a noise, Millie steps into her backyard and stumbles upon the injured young Englishman Harrison, who has murdered Mr. Williamson, a member of the local settler community. It is a strange moment of almost maternal affection that drives her to feed and care for the boyish murderer shaken by the trauma of his own action. “She broke the bread and butter into little pieces, and she thought, ‘They won’t ketch him. Not if I can ’elp it. Men is all beasts. I don’t care wot ’e’s done, or wot ’e ’asn’t done. See ’im through, Millie Evans. ’E’s nothink but a sick kid’” (27).
Admitting the murderer into the folds of her protective care, Millie reveals the fragility of the veneer separating the sheltered tedium of domesticity from the violence of the external landscape; it is a veneer that, in Mansfield’s stories, is always more fragile than it seems on the surface. This revelation culminates in a strange and disruptive emotional reversal for Millie. Later in the day, after she has fed and cared for Harrison and sent him on his way, the men of the house return home and begin a frantic hunt for the murderer. The story ends with the men hunting down Harrison like an animal and Millie breaking into a hysteria of excitement at what promises to be the revenge killing of the same boy she had nourished and tended to a few hours back:
And at the sight of Harrison in the distance, and the three men hot after, a strange mad joy smothered everything else. She rushed into the road—she laughed and shrieked and danced in the dust, jiggling the lantern. “A-ah! Arter ’im, Sid!
A-a-a-h! Ketch him, Willie. Go it! Go it! A-ah, Sid! Shoot ’im down. Shoot ’im!” (28)
“Millie” literalizes a tension that characterizes much of Mansfield’s fiction, though usually in a more subtle, covert, or metaphorical form: a tension between a routine-encased domestic space on one hand and the powerful undercurrent of violence and trauma on the other, both of them uneasy and unavoidable legacies of colonial history. The ambience of colonial life outside the domestic sphere probably owes much to the tradition of colonial writing that Lydia Wevers identifies as “a discourse of exteriority,” contingent on visible markers of difference, such as clothing, landscape, and even certain behavioral stereotypes including violence, adventure, and conflict.30 But while the public space of colonial history in New Zealand is inevitably ridden with conflict, violence, and trauma, the white settler society tries its utmost to ensure the construction of a feminized domestic space seemingly sheltered from such conflicts. It is indicative of Mansfield’s cultural and historical sensitivity as a writer that she is able to see through this fragile shelter imposed by settler colonial society.
The occasional eruption of the violent colonial reality in Mansfield’s stories is almost exclusively experienced by the white settler underclass. Only a fragmented awareness of violence against the Māori appears in the rare entry of The Urewera Notebook, which sometimes shapes elements of her fictional setting. As Ian Gordon, the editor of The Urewera Notebook, observes, the description of the store at Rangitaiki is one of the sources of Mansfield’s story “The Woman at the Store.” Located far outside the urban and suburban English settler lifestyle, with its tea parties and country houses and everyday routine regulated by caretakers and governesses, this is one of the rare stories in Mansfield’s oeuvre that captures the wilderness of the backcountry landscape and refracts it through a worldview that is bitter, savage, and unforgiving. “There is no twilight in our New Zealand days, but a curious half-hour when everything appears grotesque—it frightens—as though the savage spirit of the country walked abroad and sneered at what it saw” (13). It is one of those stories where the fragile barriers separating the private and public spheres have been shattered and their gender politics turned inside out with vengeance. The unkempt interior of the house appears in an ironic contrast with the colonial flavor of the décor, which makes up a destructive counterpart to the well-trimmed colonial domesticity of “Millie.” In the present story, this is what the room looks like: “It was a large room, the walls plastered with old pages of English periodicals. Queen Victoria’s Jubilee appeared to be the most recent number. … Flies buzzed in circles round the ceiling, and treacle papers and bundles of dried clover were pinned to the window curtains” (13). The life led by the lone woman and the half-crazed child whom the travelers come across is a combination of desolation, monotony, and bareness: “‘Good Lord, what a life!’ I thought. ‘Imagine being here day in, day out, with that rat of a child and a mangy dog’” (13). The child provides concrete form to the kind of violence that only lurks in the dark crevices of the souls of Kezia, Laura, Lottie, and the other children of families such as the Burnells and the Sheridans. Her drawings are the most frightening of all: “And those drawings of hers were extraordinarily and repulsively vulgar. The creations of a lunatic with a lunatic’s cleverness. There was no doubt about it, the kid’s mind was diseased. While she showed them to us, she worked herself into a mad excitement, laughing and trembling, and shooting out her arms” (17).
In one of the pictures she draws for the visitors we get a direct hint of the distorted mind of the child and the violence that has shaped her life. The drawing also reveals what is perhaps her darkest secret—that her mother had shot and killed her own husband, the child’s father. Just in the way the frail surface of a restful domestic atmosphere is shattered by Millie’s violent excitement in the conclusion of her story, the erotic atmosphere of intoxication in “The Woman at the Store” is punctured by the violation implicit in the child’s picture:
“I done the one she told me I never ought to. I done the one she told me she’d shoot me if I did. Don’t care! Don’t care!”
The kid had drawn the picture of the woman shooting at a man with a rook rifle and then digging a hole to bury him in. (19)
Both “Millie” and “The Woman at the Store” were written soon after Mansfield left her country of birth, never to return again. As Andrew Bennett points out, along with the story “Ole Underwood” they make up a triad of early New Zealand stories that “centre around violence and lawlessness—indeed, all three centre on an act of murder.”31 Within Mansfield’s oeuvre, these darker stories offer a contrast to the more ostensibly pleasant, ordinary, domestic everyday that seems to form the staple of her work. “The Woman at the Store,” for instance, frames a nightmare world that quickly vanishes with the end of the story, as if it had never existed: “A bend in the road, and the whole place disappeared” (19). More often than not, however, the suggestions—or reality—of violence very subtly disrupt the texture of ordinary domesticity within the framework of a single story. It is intriguing to note that Mansfield’s recollection of the “most horrible massacre” of Opipi is made in the same notebook entry that describes the store that forms the setting of the story “The Woman at the Store,” just a few lines apart from each other. Her awareness of a traumatic colonial history rooted in the same landscape that served as the setting of the story clearly influenced her depiction of what is one of the bleakest, bitterest, and darkest ambiences in her work. Indeed, the colonial massacre casts a shadow on her description of the store in Opipi, where conflict and bitterness seem to hang heavy, coloring the attitudes of the two Māori men at the store: “Then lunch at Rangitaiki,” she writes, “the store is so ugly—they do not seem glad or surprised to see us—give us fresh bread—all surly and familiar—and they seem troubled.”32 This is a crucial example of the way in which ravaged indigenous landscapes and histories get metonymically transformed in Mansfield’s imagination, where violence, bitterness, and trauma are often divested of their mooring in indigenous history but continue to linger ominously.
Shadows of the indigenous presence in colonial New Zealand appear in Mansfield’s stories in a way that is very different from the violence and lawlessness that often mark the lives of the white settler underclass. If the Māori represent a dramatic departure from the dominant societal norm of the domestic everyday, they do so through images of romance and beauty foreign to the worldview of white settler life. In “How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped,” Mansfield creates a dreamy, allegorical tale that explores the duality of restriction and freedom, the banality of routine and the excitement of spontaneous behavior through a romanticized opposition of Western and non-Western cultures. This opposition clearly reflects Mansfield’s understanding of the relation between the European and the Māori, which often surfaces in The Urewera Notebook and is evidently influenced by essentialized constructions of Māori culture dominant at that time. In the story, the dark women, their physical descriptions and dress, the children they nurture, and the community of people they live with all strongly resonate with the way Mansfield perceived and wrote about them in The Urewera Notebook, perhaps, as Gordon argues, as a result of the warm welcome her camping party had received from the Māori guide and his family. Mansfield’s prose, in this passage, is animated by a happy romance:
The child saying “Nicely thank you,” the shy children, the Mother & the brown baby—thin & naked, the other bright children, her splendid face and regal bearing. Then at the gate of the P.O. a great bright coloured crowd, almost threatening looking—a follower of Rua with long Fijian hair & side combs, a most beautiful girl of 15, she is married to a patriarch, her laughing face, her hands playing with the children’s hair, her smiles.33
Her delight in the company of the Māori is mirrored by her love for what she considers authentic Englishness. Her pleasure in the company of the English comes up in an entry on the next page of the notebook: “Here, too, I meet Prodgers—it is splendid to see once again real English people. I am so tired & sick of the third rate article. Give me the Māori and the tourist but nothing between.”34 For Mansfield, the self-image of settler colonial society is shaped by a kind of self-loathing framed, on one hand, by admiration of “real English people” and, on the other, by the romance of the Māori. In her fiction, while the former embodies a significant social impulse underlying settler society, the latter casts a rarer, more fragmented shadow, shaping landscape and atmosphere more often than characters. “Pearl Button” is one of those rare stories populated by figures who evoke the Māori. Reading the allegorized duality of the story, Kate Fullbrook writes: “The salient features of this story belong to the romantic tradition that glorifies the ‘naturalness’ and ‘freedom’ of the savage over the inhibitions and pleasure-denying aspects of mechanical civilization.”35 Pearl Button is from “the House of Boxes,” where people’s lives are boxed in by routine, none more than those of the women, confined to the labor of sustaining the everyday. Even the little girl knows it all too well. When the dark women ask her where her mother is, she’s quick to answer: “‘In the kitching, ironing-because-its-Tuesday’” (20). For the child, to whom the world only makes sense through patterns, the causal connection between labor and routine is central and obvious. But far on the other end of the settler everyday lie the stirrings of a radically alien culture that offers a promise of unscripted freedom.
Grown women, in Mansfield’s world, are often trapped in the colonial world of suffocating rules and prohibitions; tedium is such an overarching reality of their lives that that they often fail to notice it. The children, most of whom are female, seem to enjoy a relative degree of possibility and open space, though even in their lives the strictures of a patriarchal colonial system loom close by. Pearl Button, who in the House of Boxes is already trapped in such a life, enters a world of beauty, drama, and excitement, where she does her best to act according to the social decorum in which her society has already trained her: “She carefully pulled up her pinafore and dress and sat on her petticoat as she had been taught to sit in dusty places” (21). She is terrified when she spills fruit juice on her dress, but this is a world where such things do not count as social infractions: “‘That doesn’t matter at all,’ said the woman, patting her cheek” (21). In her reading of the story, Fullbrook argues that Pearl Button escapes into this world rather than being kidnapped in it: “Pearl, who is not kidnapped at all, rather escapes from the world of masks into the world of freedom, only to be forced by the police, as if she was a criminal, to abandon her loosely structured utopia to be schooled into the rigid categories of women ‘ironing-because-it’s-Tuesday’ and men who inevitably ‘go to offices.’”36 Indeed, at the end of the story, when Pearl is taken back to the world from which she came, it feels that she is carried away not back to home but to a prison: “Little men in blue coats—little blue men came running, running towards her with shouts and whistlings—a crowd of little blue men to carry her back to the House of Boxes” (23).
Mansfield’s fiction moves between the comforts of the quotidian to the oppressiveness of boredom. But it is also haunted by the specter of transgression. But the specter takes bodily form only in rare fragments, sometimes through spells of intricately wrought fantasy that seek to disrupt the rules of social conduct. If Beryl is subjected to limitations imposed by the patriarchal structures of middle-class settler society in “Prelude” and is pushed to indulge in the fantasy of excitement over imaginary suitors from England, she herself embodies forbidding authority to Alice, the servant girl, who seeks respite in even richer fantasies. Alice’s fantasies derive partly from her interest in the reading of dreams and partly from the imagination of clever retorts she knows she will never actually make to her employers. At Beryl’s appearance, Alice slips the Dream Book “under the butter dish … Alice was a mild creature in reality, but she had the most marvellous retorts ready for questions that she knew would never be put to her. The composing of them and the turning of them over and over in her mind comforted her just as much as if they’d been expressed” (111). If authority limits her life, she has carved out an imaginary life where she disrupts this authority and lights things up with the sparks of disruption.
Transgression takes various shapes in Mansfield’s stories. It disrupts not only the texture and landscape of domestic tedium but also the material and ideological structures of colonial life that upholds this class and gender-bound social landscape. Such transgression might be enacted through Alice’s imaginary retorts, the liberating kidnapping of Pearl Button, or even the murderous violence of the woman in “The Woman in the Store” or Millie’s aggressive frenzy. If Pearl Button’s story inscribes the short-lived liberty of a child in allegorical terms, the duck-slaughtering scene in “Prelude” exhibits violence, excitement, and pain in a momentary burst, narrated with excruciating realism:
Pat grabbed the duck by the legs, laid it flat across the stump, and almost at the same time down came the little tomahawk and the duck’s head flew off the stump. Up the blood spurted over the white feathers and over his hand.
When the children saw the blood they were frightened no longer. They crowded round him and began to scream. Even Isabel leapt about crying: “The blood! The blood!” Pip forgot all about his duck. He simply threw it away from him and shouted, “I saw it. I saw it,” and jumped round the wooden block. (108)
The sight of blood seems to provide the children a release for the tension and fear of the preceding moments and gives them a sense of closure to the whole drama. It is at such moments when the distance between them and the “diseased” child in “The Woman at the Store” becomes thin, drawing out, as it were, a dormant dimension of cruelty and bloodthirstiness in their natures. In Freudian terms, the triumph of the id over the superego is revealed in the spontaneous violence of these children. But the triumph, in this scene of “Prelude,” is neither decisive nor complete. The headless body of the duck is caught in a series of muscular paroxysms, imitating its live steps on its way back to the stream, as if it wants to escape its death and mutilation in one phantasmagoric effort. While little Isabel finds it hilarious, squealing, “it’s like a little engine. It’s like a funny little railway engine,” for Kezia—the girl whose characterization is marked with autobiographical echoes to Mansfield—it suddenly becomes a nightmare that desperately needs to be restored to normalcy:
But Kezia suddenly rushed at Pat and flung her arms round his legs and butted her head as hard as she could against his knees.
“Put head back! Put head back!” she screamed. (109)
The children, especially the girls Kezia, Lottie, and Isabel, are located in the limited open space this society offers its female children but withholds from its adult women. As they move around in that space, the three girls seek out the new and the exciting and the dramatic, a quest that indicates the presence of a potential adult discontent in themselves, if only in an embryonic form. If the constriction of the private, domestic life of women and female children creates unfulfilled, banalized spaces carefully screened off from a more disturbed external landscape, the frail veneer of separation suffers periodic ruptures, often caused by a transgressive female sensibility where violence and liberation are mutually indistinguishable. Whether it is literalized in Millie’s outburst or symbolized in the children’s excitement over the slaughter of the duck, such ruptures shape a continuous narrative of covert tension in Mansfield’s work.
In The Predicament of Culture, James Clifford reads the fragmentation of experience, the disruption of power structures, and the diffusion of cultural relativism reflected in early-twentieth-century French art, literature, and ethnography through close, interconnected generic networks. All these genres were driven by the need to make sense of a complex reality shaped by the conflict of the familiar and the “exotic,” the self and the other, the local and the global. In their efforts to interpret reality, Clifford argues, both the ethnographer and the surrealist engage in a drastic reshuffling of it, as the stability of an available reality is contested more than ever.
To state the contrast schematically, anthropological humanism begins with the different and renders it—through naming, classifying, describing, interpreting—comprehensible. It familiarizes. An ethnographic surrealist practice, by contrast, attacks the familiar, provoking the eruption of otherness—the unexpected. The two attitudes presuppose each other; both are elements within a complex process that generates cultural meanings, definitions of self and other.37 Such an ethnographic practice situates different cultures in a relationship of eruptive mutual contact that also begins to define the traumatized global modernity shaping the backdrop of literary modernism. Ethnographic surrealism, similarly, depicts the coming together of competing values—no longer mutually hierarchical—as the means of apprehending a reality that is strikingly disruptive and perilously unstable.
If the early-twentieth-century destabilization of colonial empires contributes to what Clifford calls ethnographic surrealism’s eclectic juxtaposition of the alien and the familiar, the colonial setting of Katherine Mansfield’s fiction—complicated by the triad of the absent metropolis, the in-between settler class, and the indigenous communities—projects this juxtaposition with a deceptive subtlety. Mansfield represents that intriguingly transitional sensibility within the chapter of New Zealand literary history that precedes the cultural nationalism of the 1930s—which is captured, for instance, in Frank Sargeson’s distinctive regionalism—but that has already begun to depart from the stereotypes of colonial life in the nineteenth century. Even so, it is very much a Pākehā perception of the colonial landscape. It is a landscape that is, moreover, pushed to the margins of the worldview of white settler society as embodied within an upper-middle-class female sensibility. But the unnamed traumas of this marginalized landscape both shape and threaten the daily security of domestic settler life. The seamlessly ordinary and humdrum surface of this life is riven by an undercurrent of violent ruptures in the social fabric of colonial society. The most striking way in which Mansfield’s work recalls Clifford’s model of contested global modernity is the deceptiveness with which it does it, through the unlikely and understated network of boredom, idyll, and violence that straddles both her fiction and her nonfiction.