Abstract
In a poignant letter to her partner John Middleton Murry, written during one of her numerous sojourns in France, Katherine Mansfield lamented her lack of a ‘real home’ and a ‘real life’: ‘Why haven’t I got a chinese nurse with green trousers and two babies who rush at me and clasp my knees — Im not a girl — Im a woman. I want things. Shall I ever have them?’1 Mansfield’s definition of a ‘real life’ as a version of middle-class, settled (white) domesticity remained elusive in her adult life: a restless nomad, repeatedly moving between England and Europe and setting her most evocative stories in the New Zealand of her childhood memories, Mansfield exemplifies instead the post-colonial subject who is never ‘at home’ anywhere, subject of a ‘mother country’ and ‘homeland’ (England) that affords no home at all. Mansfield’s repeated references to her desire for a ‘real home’ instead underscore the way in which the category of ‘home’ functions not only as a geographical and social concept, but as a psychological and abstract marker of personal, cultural, and national identity. For Mansfield, like many other writers, ‘language becomes the country. One enters the country of words’.2
‘In his text the writer sets up house […] For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.’
Theodor Adorno
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Notes
(?7 May 1915); Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, eds, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–2008), Vol. 1, p. 177. Hereafter referred to as Letters followed by volume and page number.
Hélène Cixous, Coming to Writing and Other Essays, ed. by Deborah Jenson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Edward W. Said, ‘No Reconciliation Allowed’, in André Aciman, ed., Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 88.
Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Introduction’, in Elizabeth Bowen, ed., Stories by Katherine Mansfield (New York: Vintage, 1956), pp. xvii, xix.
For an early and excellent discussion of Mansfield as an expatriate writer, see Andrew Gurr, Writers in Exile: The Identity of Home in Modern Literature (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981), pp. 33–64.
V. S. Pritchett, ‘Who Are These People?’ in Vincent O’Sullivan, ed., Katherine Mansfield: Selected Stories (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2006), p. 344.
Frank O’Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (London: Macmillan Press, 1963), pp. 363–4.
Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Feminist Politics: What’s Home Got to Do with It?’ in Teresa de Lauretis, ed., Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 196.
Sydney Janet Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 114.
Kaplan, pp. 114–17; see also Patricia Moran, Word of Mouth: Body/Language in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1996), pp. 110–13.
John Middleton Murry, ed., The Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield (New York: Knopf, 1941), p. 548. Hereafter referred to as Stories.
Margaret Scott, ed., The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 2 vols (Canterbury and Wellington: Lincoln University Press and Daphne Brasell Associates, 1997), Vol. 2, p. 166. Hereafter referred to as Notebooks followed by volume and page number.
Willa Cather, ‘Katherine Mansfield’, in Willa Cather, Not under Forty (New York: Knopf, 1936), pp. 123–47.
Angela Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Angela Smith, ed., Katherine Mansfield: Selected Stories (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. xxxi.
Roberta Rubenstein, Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women’s Fiction (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave St Martin’s Press, 2001), pp. 4, 5.
Torsten Pettersson, ‘Why Did Some Authors Become Modernists? Early High Modernism and Multipolar Identities’, in Mats Jansson, Jakob Lothe and Hannu Riikonen, eds, European and Nordic Modernisms (Norwich: Norvik Press, 2004), p. 28.
Clare Hanson, ed., The Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1987), p. 102.
Mary Morris, ‘Looking for Home’, in Mickey Pearlman, ed., A Place Called Home: Twenty Writing Women Remember (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), p. 39.
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© 2015 Patricia Moran
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Moran, P. (2015). The ‘dream of roots and the mirage of the journey’: Writing as Homeland in Katherine Mansfield. In: Kascakova, J., Kimber, G. (eds) Katherine Mansfield and Continental Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137429971_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137429971_13
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