Abstract
In the 1910s Mansfield repeatedly went to the pictures. As her writings show, she was intrigued by both films and audiences, and she perceived an analogy between films, dreams and other mental processes. To understand the development of Mansfield’s cinematic imagination, the chapter focuses on her youthful interest for Walter Pater’s The Child in the House, which opens with a cinematic dream that is conducive to self-analysis. After exploring Pater’s neo-Platonic interest for the theatre of the mind, which resulted in his theory of the stream of consciousness, the chapter discusses Post-Impressionist interart aesthetics, focusing on its indifference to cinema. As rooted in photography, cinema was too realistic and mechanical to inspire avant-garde artists, but Mansfield was daring enough to grasp its liberating potential.
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Notes
See S. Sandley (2011) ‘Leaping into the Eyes: Mansfield as a Cinematic Writer’, in Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays, eds G. Kimber and J. Wilson (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 72.
K. Mansfield (2002 [1997]) The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, ed. M. Scott (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P), vol. 2, p. 3.
K. Mansfield, To J. M. Murry (10 and 11 February 1918), in The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, vol. 2 (1918–1919) (1987), eds V. O’ Sullivan and M. Scott (Oxford: Clarendon P), p. 66.
Quoted in L. Marcus (1998) Introduction to ‘The Contribution of H. D.’, in J. Donald, A. Friedberg and L. Marcus (eds), Close Up: Cinema and Modernism (London: Cassell), p. 96.
W. Lewis (1939) ‘Essay on the Objective of Art in Our Time’, in Wyndham Lewis, the Artist: from ‘Blast’ to Burlington House (New York: Haskell), p. 347.
K. Mansfield, To J. M. Murry (9–10 May 1915), in The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, vol. 1 (1903–1917) (1984) eds V. O’ Sullivan and M. Scott (Oxford: Clarendon P), p. 182.
In his story Pater traces a clear opposition between our’ sense of home’ — or our ‘customary love of the earth’ — and our ‘fear of death’, the great unknown. W. Pater (1896) The Child in the House: An Imaginary Portrait (Portland, Maine: T. B. Mosher), pp. 13–14.
L. Marcus (2008) The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (Oxford: Oxford UP), p. 147.
W. Pater, (1910 [1893]) Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures (London: Macmillan), p. 248.
What we now know about the creative quality of memory, in which the past is continuously transfigured, sheds new light on the performative dimension of our inner life, but we should bear in mind that the connection between mental activity and mimetic forms of spectacle is time-honoured. The parallel between dreaming and theatre recurs in the works of Shakespeare. Similarly, the idea of memory as an inner theatre is already present in early modern mnemotechnics, as shown by Giulio Camillo’s The Idea of the Theater (L’idea del theatro, 1550). See F. A. Yates (1966) The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).
See W. James (1952 [1890]) Principles of Psychology (Chicago and London: Encyclopaedia Britannica), p. 146.
Mansfield, Notebooks, vol. 1, p. 112. For an analysis of young Mansfield’s engagement with Impressionist aesthetics, see my analysis of ‘In the Botanical Gardens’: M. Ascari (2010) ‘Katherine Mansfield and the Gardens of the Soul’, Katherine Mansfield Studies, 2: 39–55.
J. M. Murry (summer 1911) ‘Art and Philosophy’, Rhythm, 1.1, pp. 11–12.
See A. Smith (2000) Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life (Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 8–11.
O. R. Drey (December 1912) ‘The Autumn Salon’, Rhythm, 2.11, p. 327.
O. R. Drey (January 1913) ‘Post-Impressionism’, Rhythm, 2.12, p. 369.
W. L. George (May 1913) ‘The Esperanto of Art’, The Blue Review, 1.1, p. 28.
See M. Wood (2011 [1999]) ‘Modernism and Film’, in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. M. Levenson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP), p. 273.
H. Bergson (1922 [1911]) Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell (London: Macmillan), p. 322.
For a discussion of the popular character of early cinema and the first attempts to enhance its status — either by adapting drama and treating more elevated subjects or by developing technological innovations that refined its language — see P. Younger (2011) ‘Film as Art’, in The Routledge Companion to Film History, ed. W. Guynn (New York: Routledge), pp. 27–38.
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© 2014 Maurizio Ascari
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Ascari, M. (2014). Mansfield, Silent Film and Post-Impressionism. In: Cinema and the Imagination in Katherine Mansfield’s Writing. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137400369_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137400369_2
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