The Mask Beneath the Mask: The Journal of Katherine Mansfield

Abstract

‘True to oneself! Which self?’ asked Katherine Mansfield in her notebook of 1920. It was a question which plagued her throughout her life, and one which forms a recurrent and haunting motif in her journal. Katherine Mansfield’s search for a unified identity is both a central theme of her personal writing and one which informs her fiction, as she experimented with different ‘voices’ and filtered episodes from her own life through a variety of literary perspectives in order to catch the ‘truth’ of experience. ‘Is it not possible’, she asked in that same 1920 entry, ‘that the rage for confession, autobiography, especially for memories of earliest childhood, is explained by our persistent yet mysterious belief in a self which is continuous and permanent;’¹ Mansfield’s own attempt to recapture her childhood, her questioning style, her apparent artlessness of expression and her urgent need to reconcile contradictory impulses, are features of both her journal and her published stories. These two forms of writing, the private and the public, the confidential aside and the imaginative fiction, are closely bound together both in their approach and in their exploration of self.

Don’t lower your mask until you have another mask prepared beneath — as terrible as you like — but a mask.

—Katherine Mansfield to John Middleton Murry, 1917