Abstract
In a 1938 article on New Zealand literature, Robin Hyde suggests an intriguing source for a type of exilic critical consciousness she observes in her fellow New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield. Hyde begins by describing Mansfield’s sense of alienation as a trigger for her emigration to England: “People say K. M. ran away from New Zealand, but if you could see and understand her exact environs, you might sympathize with the belief that she ran away from a sham England, unsuccessfully transplanted to New Zealand soil, and utterly unable to adapt itself to the real New Zealand.”1 A prolific author herself, Hyde writes out of her personal experience of New Zealand settler reality, and concludes that it is precisely these conditions—Mansfield’s enclosure behind doors in “the heavy, conventional well-to-do household around her”—that generated her ability “to look out of windows” and craft her most celebrated modernist tales.2 Mansfield herself seemingly negates Hyde’s interpretation with a 1922 letter to Sarah Gertrude Millin, in which she describes how in the preceding five years of her life, her most productive years, her thoughts and feelings would always “go back to New Zealand—rediscovering it, finding beauty in it, re-living it.” She concludes the letter by stating, “I am sure it does a writer no good to be transplanted […] I think the only way to live as a writer is to draw upon one’s real familiar life—to find the treasure in that as Olive Schreiner did.
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Notes
Robin Hyde, “The Singers of Loneliness,” in Disputed Ground: Robin Hyde, Journalist, ed. Gillian Boddy and Jacqueline Matthews (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1991), 354–355.
Mansfield to Sarah Gertrude Millin, “March 1922,” in The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Vol. 5, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 80.
Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), 259, emphasis original.
Emphasis is instead often placed on their social and geographical marginalization as colonial women in exile in England; see, for instance, the two extant comparative analyses of the two authors: Cherry Clayton, “Olive Schreiner and Katherine Mansfield: Artistic Transformations of the Outcast Figure by Two Colonial Women Writers in Exile,” English Studies in Africa 32.2 (1989), 109–119;
and Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, Fictions of the Female Self: Charlotte Brontë, Olive Schreiner, Katherine Mansfield (London: Macmillan, 1991).
W. T. Stead, “The Novel of the Modern Woman,” Review of Reviews 10 (1894), 64;
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own (Expanded edition) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 199.
Sydney Janet Kaplan, Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (London: Cornell University Press, 1991), 5.
Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 336.
Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 34–35.
Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 186; see also Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Vintage, 1994), 60–61.
Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 17.
See Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), especially 196–216.
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995), 34.
Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” History Workshop 5 (1978), 14.
Karen Chase and Michael Levenson, A Public Life for the Victorian Family (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 143.
Victoria Rosner, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 14.
On links between modernism, feminism, and gender, see also Marianne DeKoven, “Modernism and Gender,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
Bonnie Kime Scott, The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990);
and Ann L. Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990).
Patrick Williams, “ ‘Simultaneous Uncontemporaneities’: Theorising Modernism and Empire,” in Modernism and Empire, ed. Howard Booth and Nigel Rigby (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 25.
Ruth First and Ann Scott, Olive Schreiner (London: Andre Deutsch, 1980), 196.
Doris Lessing, “Afterword to The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner,” in A Small Personal Voice, ed. Paul Schlueter (London: Flamingo, 1994), 162–163.
Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 13; all subsequent references in text.
J. M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (London: Yale University Press, 1988), 65.
See Miriam Wallraven, A Writing Halfway Between Theory and Fiction: Mediating Feminism from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), 127.
Schreiner, From Man to Man (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1926), 171.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Vol. 2: Sexchanges (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 60.
Schreiner, Dreams (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1897), 67–68; all subsequent references in text.
Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1915 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 242.
Claire Tomalin, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (London: Viking, 1987), 8–9; see also note 1.
Saikat Majumdar, “Katherine Mansfield and the Fragility of Pākehā Boredom,” Modern Fiction Studies 55.1 (2009), 122.
Sylvia Berkman, Katherine Mansfield: A Critical Study (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 49.
See Janet Wilson, “‘Where is Katherine?’: Longing and (Un)belonging in the Work of Katherine Mansfield,” in Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays, ed. Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 175–188; and Boehmer, “Mansfield as Colonial Modernist: Difference Within,” 57–71 in the same volume.
Lydia Wevers, “How Kathleen Beauchamp Was Kidnapped,” in Critical Essays on Katherine Mansfield, ed. Rhoda Nathan (Oxford: Maxwell Macmillan, 1993), 44.
Miles Fairburn, The Ideal Society and Its Enemies: The Foundations of Modern New Zealand Society 1850–1900 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1989), 202–203; see also Mansfield’s 1913 story “Millie,” in which a print on a bedroom wall titled “Garden Party at the Windsor Castle” only highlights a settler woman’s isolation; in Collected Fiction, Vol. 1, 326–330.
Sarah Ailwood, “Anxious Beginnings: Mental Illness, Reproduction and Nation Building in ‘Prelude’ and Prelude to Christopher,” Katherine Mansfield Studies 2 (2010), 28.
Richard Evans, The Feminists: Women’s Emancipation Movements in Europe, America and Australasia 1840–1920 (New York: Routledge, 1977), 63, 233–234.
Boehmer, “Edward Said and (the Postcolonial Occlusion of) Gender,” in Edward Said and the Literary, Social, and Political World, ed. Ranjan Ghosh (London: Routledge, 2009), 124.
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© 2015 Robert T. Tally Jr.
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Syrkin, E. (2015). Exilic Consciousness and Alternative Modernist Geographies in the Work of Olive Schreiner and Katherine Mansfield. In: Tally, R.T. (eds) The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137487209_10
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