Katherine Mansfield and the Rejection of England

Abstract

The opening of Katherine Mansfield’s birthplace to the public in 1988, the hundredth anniversary of her birth, accorded her a unique status - ‘a position, in relation to the literature of New Zealand, not unlike Shakespeare’s for ‘English’ in general: a position of priority and pre-eminence’ (Hardy 76). Although Mansfield spent half her life in England and Europe, and roughly half her 90-odd stories are set there, according to many accounts she is always the New Zealander. A longstanding judgment is that her best work derives from her Wellington childhood.¹ In her stories, the beach in early morning, the city, its houses and gardens take on the quality of myth. In an alternative view, Mansfield is the international modernist, and, with Joyce or Lawrence, a traveller and exile (O'Sullivan 5–15). Attention has now turned to Mansfield’s colonial context.² In the paradigms of postcolonialism, her white-settler society, defining itself by its difference from the Maori, can never be authentically ‘English’. It is rather a hybrid, produced by the colonial setting, that mimics Englishness. Mansfield defined a similarly interstitial position for the colonial, and personally repudiated it, in the diary of her trek in the Urewera region of New Zealand in 1907. She was then nineteen, and back after three years at school in London. On meeting some English tourists, she wrote: ‘it is splendid to see once again real English people.

‘Then you are an English woman?’ ‘Well, hardly -’

‘The Luftbad’