Ideological Stances and Aesthetic Concerns

Abstract

After contextualising ‘The Common Round’ in the New Age issue in which it appeared, this chapter discusses its rewriting into ‘Pictures’. It then focuses on the recurring presence of mirrors in Mansfield’s ‘experiments in dialogue’, drawing a parallel between this narrative tool of psychological investigation pivoting on the body and the cinema screen. Mansfield’s use of mirrors — which reasserts the primacy of the visual over the verbal — is analysed also in relation to Bergson’s theory of the double as composed of a social and inner self. The revelatory power of cinema close-ups is then compared with that of photography, whose uncanny psychological insight was debated already in the nineteenth century. A final comparison between the cinema’s animistic tendency and Mansfield’s poetics of visual intensity is drawn.