Use of Humour

Abstract

Humour is frequently present in Mansfield’s short stories (as it is in her personal writing and letters), yet this is one aspect of her writing continually glossed over by many of her critics. She displays in her narrative art, wit, metaphorical flair, psychological subtlety and incisive phrasing in order to capture the nuances of consciousness and the duplicities of society. During her lifetime she was renowned for being an amusing companion, raconteur and mimic; many years after her death, Leonard Woolf remarked of her, ‘I don’t think anyone has ever made me laugh more than she did in those days’.¹ In her fiction, the comedic side of her personality is used to great effect — and is present in almost every mature story. Katherine Anne Porter was a rare, early Mansfieldian critic who understood the importance of Mansfield’s use of humour, noting in 1937: ‘She possessed, for it is in her work, a real gaiety and a natural sense of comedy; there were many sides to her that made her able to perceive and convey in her stories a sense of human beings living on many planes at once, with all the elements justly ordered and in right proportion. This is a great gift’.²