Abstract
While Mansfield’s youthful vignettes are marked by a recurring Impressionist technique — the presence of an observer behind a window — this chapter argues that Mansfield needed to do away with this intrusively ego-centric gaze to develop a transparent medium. It was cinema that taught Mansfield to develop new techniques, as evident already in ‘Spring Pictures’, written in 1915, and in particular in the six stories she published in the New Age between May and June 1917, after working as an extra in the cinema industry. Dramatic and cinematic techniques combine in these ‘experiments in dialogue’, which are marked by the erasure of the narrator and by a brisk syntax, and which may be considered as pseudo-scripts that readers turn into films through their imagination.
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Notes
Both Alpers and Kaplan discuss the recurrence of this technique in Mansfield’s autobiographical juvenile fiction as the symbolic equivalent of her psychological condition of alienation. Due both to her nonconforming sexuality and her cultural interest, the young Mansfield felt she did not ‘belong’ and projected herself onto different spaces. See S. J. Kaplan (1991) Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP), p. 72.
C. Hankin (1983) Katherine Mansfield and Her Confessional Stories (New York: St. Martin’s P), p. 224.
See S. Freud (1962 [1930]) Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. J. Strachey (New York: Norton), p. 12.
C. Baudelaire (1964) ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. J. Mayne (London: Phaidon P), p. 9.
C. Baudelaire (1919) ‘Crowds’, trans. A. Symons, in Baudelaire: His Prose and Poetry, ed. T. R. Smith (New York: Boni and Liveright), p. 47.
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. 78.
The story was written in 1915, possibly in Paris. See A. Alpers (ed.) (1984) The Stories of Katherine Mansfield (Auckland, Melbourne, Oxford: Oxford UP), p. 554.
Sergei Eisenstein famously discussed a dissolve that appears in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities and that is likewise indicated by suspension marks. See S. Eisenstein, ‘Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today’ (1944), in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (1977 [1949]) ed. and trans. J. Leyda (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt), pp. 213–214.
The ‘cinematic quality’ of this story has also been discussed by Julia Van Gunsteren, who relates it to the presence of recurring details which also serve ‘to unify later sections with the opening one’, ‘establishing a pattern of internal reference that creates unity in a basically fragmentary Impressionistic story.’ J. Van Gusteren (1990) Katherine Mansfield and Literary Impressionism (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi), p. 147.
Antony Alpers, (1980) The Life of Katherine Mansfield (New York: The Viking P), p. 238.
A. Tchehov (3 May 1917) ‘In the Barber’s Saloon’, The New Age, 21.1: 19–20
H. F. (3 May 1917) ‘Military Instruction: An Impression’, The New Age, 21.1: 21–22.
K. Mansfield (1930) ‘A Ship Comes Into the Harbour’, Novels and Novelists (London: Constable), pp. 107–108.
W. H. New (1999) Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP), p. 77.
In the early months of 1917 the author also wrote a play entitled A Ship in the Harbour, of which no trace is left, although we know that she had reached act three by April. See C. Tomalin (1987) Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (London: Viking), p. 159.
K. Mansfield, To Bertrand Russell (16 January 1917), in The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, vol. 1 (1903–1917) (1984) eds V. O’ Sullivan and M. Scott (Oxford: Clarendon P), p. 293.
H. James (1953) Preface to The Awkward Age, in The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), p. 110.
K. Mansfield (17 May 1917) ‘The Black Cap’, The New Age, 21.3: 62.
V. O’Sullivan (1997) Introduction, in New Zealand Stories, selected by V. O’Sullivan (Auckland: Oxford UP), p. 5.
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© 2014 Maurizio Ascari
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Ascari, M. (2014). Beyond Impressionist Subjectivity. In: Cinema and the Imagination in Katherine Mansfield’s Writing. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137400369_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137400369_3
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