Katherine Mansfield: The Triumph of Egoism

Author(s): James H. Justus

Source: Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal , Spring, 1973, Vol. 6, No. 3,
LITERATURE AND IDEAS: A MISCELLANY OF OPINIONS AND ANALYSIS (Spring, 1973),
pp. 13-22
Published by: University of Manitoba

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24778397

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 Katherine Mansfield:
The Triumph
of Egoism

By James H. Justus

Katherine Mansfield is known chiefly for two kinds of stories, both frothy.
One group, best illustrated by "Marriage à la Mode," concerns young couples
(married or otherwise) who, despite their slightly down-at-heels chic, ego
istically doubt each other's capacity to measure up to their private notions
of worth, sophistication, fidelity, and so on. They are not concerned with
social issues and indeed are only perfunctorily concerned about anything or
anyone outside themselves. The second kind of story commonly deals with
the well-to-do young innocent whose romantic dreams are shattered abruptly
by the realism of the actual world, a realism most often represented by poor
people or cynical men. This is the Katherine Mansfield of "Her First Ball"

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14 Katherine Mansfield: The Triumph of Egoism

and "The Garden Party," two stories which have been popular in the last
two decades.
But a third kind of story, not much favored now, suggests, as true a side
of Katherine Mansfield as the other two: the study of eccentric, pathetic old
ladies. Inexplicably, many early reviewers considered such stories as "The
Daughters of the Late Colonel" and "Miss Brill" not merely ineffective por
traits but heartless and snobbish caricatures. These are in fact the most
enduring stories which Katherine Mansfield wrote, partly because they de
pend upon neither a topicality in which smart talk and fashionable attitudes
soon become dated (as in "Marriage à la Mode") nor a jejune innocence
which becomes cloying naïveté (as in "Her First Ball").
The very existence of these three kinds of stories by a talented writer
suggests a somewhat broader range than Katherine Mansfield is usually
credited with having. (These groupings do not include the early sketches and
stories collected in her first book, In a German Pension [1913], the strength
of which lies in the author's brittle observations of customs, manners, and
cultural nuances and biases rather than in formal narrative art.) This range
also suggests that there is no single paradigm Mansfield story just as there is
no single such story in Lawrence, Joyce, or even Conrad. Our impulse to
find paradigmatic patterns, however, remains particularly strong in Katherine
Mansfield's case, and the texts of her stories lend some justification to it. For
the nature of recurring scenes, overlapping characters and character types,
and echoing moments of discovery, her first real story, "The Tiredness of
Rosabel" (1908), is instructive.
The story is too accomplished to be called juvenilia—its author was
twenty when she wrote it—though it is slighter in substance and thematic
development than later similar pieces. But this story of a millinery clerk who
dreams romantically after work in her shabby flat contains characters which
Katherine Mansfield was to return to again and again. As the spirited in
génue, Rosabel shows healthy flashes of exasperation in her dealings with
a wealthy young woman and her handsome escort, an overfamiliar gentle
man with a "disdainful" mouth. And though here they are mostly the stuff
of Rosabel's dreams, things of the social world are inventoried, and their
specificity in this slight narrative is the same quality which gives the later
stories their remarkable air of physical solidity: scented furs and gloves,
muffs (which later heroines invariably stroke!), Parma violets, white tulle
frocks and silver shoes, elegant luncheons for two, fires in the bedroom, in
vitations to balls and motor trips, all of which seem inseparable from the
romantic ideal—"joyous intimacy" between a man and a woman. The final
sentence reads: "And because her heritage was that tragic optimism, which
is all too often the only inheritance of youth, still half asleep, she smiled,
with a little nervous tremor round her mouth." Even the outright authorial
intrusion is to show up, considerably refined, in the mature work.
Despite her working-class status, it is easy to see how Rosabel becomes
Leila ("Her First Ball"), Laura ("The Garden Party"), Kezia ("The Doll's
House"), Fanny ("Honeymoon"), Bertha ("Bliss"), and all those other sensi
tive, well-bred young ladies who strike us as being the most patently auto
biographical of the heroines, at least at one stage in their development. But
at another stage, the spoiled, wealthy, unnamed lady of "The Tiredness of

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Katherine Mansfield: The Triumph of Egoism 15

Rosabel" must also be autobiographical. She is repeated, most notably, in

Monica Tyrell of "Revelations," Anne Proctor of "Mr. and Mrs. Dove," and
Rosemary Fell of "A Cup of Tea." If Rosabel suffers from tiredness, all of
these are threatened by ennui. Faintly dissatisfied, and fleetingly entertain
ing charitable thoughts about the working classes, they show up again,
with some variation in elegance, in such stories as "A Dill Pickle," "The
Escape," "The Stranger," and "Poison," all of which are studies of couples
who have lost any sense of Rosabel's "tragic optimism" and whose marriage
is marked by the refusal of a mate to give himself fully and unreservedly
to his spouse.
In what is perhaps Katherine Mansfield's most famous (and certainly the
most facile) story, "Marriage à la Mode," these two feminine types merge
in Isabel, who with some pangs of regret, nevertheless accepts the offer im
plied in her husband's parting letter: "God forbid, my darling, that I should
be a drag on your happinessThe words used to describe her—"shallow,
tinkling, vain"—are from the heroine's own point of view, a maneuver which
supplies both self-knowledge on the character's part and perspective on the
reader's; though modest, a kind of pervasive bovaryisme permits sympathy
for, as well as disapproval of, the protagonist. This double level of perspec
tive, carried forward by the tension between humble affection and vulgar
affectation, is one of Katherine Mansfield's hallmarks.
These Isabels, Kezias, Lauras, and Rosemarys are stunningly alive to
nuances, not despite the paraphernalia of the world which they inhabit and
dominate, but because of it. It is a rich, textural world in which things them
selves take on the kind of sentient significance that in another writer, Forster
or Lawrence or James, would be supplied by society, the intricate network
of people interacting on specific consciousnesses. In no other writer of her
day, with the possible exception of Proust, do things matter so much: a shal
low bowl of freesias, monocles on black ribbon, chestnut-stuffed meringues,
train carriages and deck chairs, hairdressers' tongs and brushes, carnations
and roses and heliotrope and violets, flannel jackets and camisole ribbons,
thimbles of cherry brandy, English overcoats and Russian cigarette cases,
pyramids of pears and grapes, rumcake and tea, letters posted and unposted.
And the situations, precisely placed—meetings at seaside retreats and out
of-the-way flats, in lengthy cab-rides and brief sea voyages, at parties and
entertainments and public tea—are socially restricted and are conceived
almost wholly in terms of talk. Outright quarrels almost never occur in a
Mansfield story; more often, bittersweet banter is chillingly premonitory of
future separations. With the quiet dropping of suggestions and the half
serious queries and evasive declarations, in domesticated scenes in which
opposing familiarities intersect, we are given the portentous clues to the death
of love.
Yet if ingénues and smart matrons, sisters to certain heroines out of
Maugham and early Noel Coward, seem the representative Mansfield pro
tagonists, there is also the sizeable group of lonely older women, shabby,
proud, some of them genteel, who have proceeded about as far as possible
from the "tragic optimism" of their youthful counterparts. "The Tiredness
of Rosabel" is again instructive. In this earliest story, dreams of romance—
pegged inevitably to affluence—can be only that. Rosabel scorns the reading

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16 Katherine Mansfield: The Triumph of Egoism

tastes of a fellow bus passenger, cheap advertisements, shoppers who only

browse, and the "sickening smell of warm humanity," but she nevertheless
lives in a room four flights up, where the inadequate heat must be supple
mented by an old flannel dressing gown, a calico nightdress, and a grimy
quilt. If Rosabel the dreamer anticipates the Leilas and Kezias of later stor
ies, what Katherine Mansfield calls "the real Rosabel, the girl crouched on
the floor in the dark," anticipates the pathetic older creatures who have no
hopes for a future and who exist perilously, mentally as well as physically,
in a locked-in present.
Such a person is the speaker in "The Canary," probably the last story
Katherine Mansfield completed before her death. The unnamed narrator has
lavished her love in turn upon her little house and garden, flowers (which
"respond wonderfully, but they don't sympathize"), the evening star ("it
seemed to be shining for me alone"), and finally a canary bought from a
Chinese salesman: "after he came into my life I forgot the evening star;
I did not need it any more." But the speaker's sadness is not the sorrow
"that we all know, like illness and poverty and death":

No, it is something different. It is there, deep down, deep down, part of

one, like one's breathing. However hard I work and tire myself I have
only to stop to know it is there, waiting.

"The Canary," a prose dramatic monologue, is hardly a story at all, but

its bleak statement on man's lonely fate is presumably Katherine Mansfield's
final word. "Perhaps it does not matter so very much what it is one loves in
this world," says the speaker. "But love something one must." Through sheer
force of will she can isolate and elevate objects of her love, but the effort
outweighs the apparent benefits. Loss, sadness, sorrow are still there, waiting.
In most stories, this fate is evoked quietly, without a trace of Modernist
experimentation. It is as if the worlds of Chekhov and Hardy had been
evoked but stripped of their social configurations, leaving only psychological
and spiritual inevitability. And yet not quite stripped. There is a kind of
poetics of poverty at work in most of the stories, blatant in some (like "Pic
tures") and covert in others (like "A Cup of Tea"), which threads the psy
chological shocks and reminds us that a grim economic unease is very much
a part of the configurations of the societies which this "comfortable" New
Zealander chose to depict. Fate in a Mansfield story is too impacted, too
felt, to admit the kind of fashionable despair that we detect in some of
the fiction of George Moore. The fragile order of routine, the occasional
treating of oneself to a modest luxury, the magnifying significance of a cher
ished treasure, all the tics and gestures which, representing a minimal purchase
on solid reality, prevent for a while longer an acceleration in the slow slide
into the abyss: these are the qualities which give a sense of psychological
movement even in those stories which have little narrative action.
"Miss Brill" is perhaps the best known and the best of these. The treasure
is a fur necklace—a cunning, roguish "Dear little thing!" to Miss Brill, a
funny, out-of-date "fried whiting" to a young girl and her boy friend in the
park; and the Sunday treat is a slice of honey-cake which might or might
not contain an almond. Her sudden realization of another perspective puts

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Katherine Mansfield: The Triumph of Egoism 17

Miss Brill's own into shadow. The fragile arrangement of her life is disordered
—perhaps permanently—and the day that begins "so brilliantly fine" ends
in her dark little room, "like a cupboard," where Miss Brill sits quietly with
her hurt.
No other story is as effectively understated as "Miss Brill," but something
of the same psychological movement can be seen in several other pieces.
"The Daughters of the Late Colonel" is high comedy. Like their later versions
by Mary Chase, Josephine and Constantia seem conceived for the stage:
well-bred, fuzzy little old ladies whose stasis and ineffectuality inside their
great house are a confirming metaphor for their tenuous accommodation to
the world outside. But behind the technical élan of the comedy—the precisely
heard dialogue and skilfully built scenes, the almost imperceptible leaking
of past causes into effects of the present—is the spiritual death that Katherine
Mansfield so brilliantly and horrifyingly traces in the vague gestures, the
magnification of the trivial, the indecisions, the fear of a former authority
which continues to drain away all will and purpose. The story dramatizes
a state that from the beginning of her career to its end obsessed Katherine
Mansfield. C
"The Daughte
who subordi
in death the
his daughters
sun on the pa
new strength
individuality
Joyce's Molly
enthusiasm f
"written by a

In youth mos
are able to th
dangerous, is frightening. j
If only I can be [a] good enough writer to st
It is the one axe I want to grind. Be free—a
yourself to life! Even to believe in life.2

Being free is merely a luxurious yearning

of Ma Parker" and "The Lady's Maid," two g
tions on "The Daughters." What the narrato
sorrow "that we all know"—illness, poverty,
very measure of the lives of both Ma Parke
"the literary gentleman" for whom she w
tress shows only mild curiosity about her di

'See the letter of May 1, 1922, to Dorothy Brett

There's no denying it. But one has to remember
night and the day, she is also an image of the teem
and round." See J. Middleton Murry, ed., The Let
York, 1932), p. 464. All other references to the l
edition.
2Letters, pp. 482-483.

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18 Katherine Mansfield: The Triumph of Egoism

is a strenuous task for Miss Ada Moss of "Pictures," which with both fullness
and delicacy describes a day in the life of a former singer. Now reduced to
living in a Bloomsbury "top-floor back," harassed by her landlady, hungry
("A pageant of Sensible Substantial Breakfasts followed the dinners across
the ceiling, shepherded by an enormous, white, uncut ham"), Miss Moss
wanders from one theatrical agency to another looking for a part. Rebuffed
by younger actresses and the cold wind and discouraged by the sight of her
fat, varicosed legs, she exists on the perilous edge only by a willed good
cheer: " 'Well, old girl,' she murmured, 'you're up against it this time, and
no mistake.' " She pragmatically solves this day's problems by allowing
herself to be picked up by a stout gentleman, who likes " 'em firm and well
covered" and who has bought her a brandy in the cafe.
Like "The Daughters," these three protagonists suffer from an inability to
"be free," from the leeching away of individuality. The maid has merged
her own life with that of her former mistress; Ma Parker has devoted all
her energies to the welfare of various members of her family; Miss Moss,
having survived her modest talent, is now willing to accept any role offered
her, including the real-life one of aging prostitute. By the merging of economic
disrepairs and psychological dislocations, Katherine Mansfield seems to sug
gest that individuality is not even a quality that can be earned. Well-to-do
young innocents may be momentarily addled by the casual onslaught of an
actuality harshly alien to their dreams, but they are young and well-to-do.
The Miss Brills and Miss Mosses are neither. For them it is not a matter
of deciding to buy a plumed hat or an exquisite enameled box for twenty
eight guineas, but whether to spend "one and thrippence" at a tea-room.
Moreover, the harshness and disappointment of these characters impinge
on the lives of the custodians of comfort considerably more frequently than
might at first appear. The discovery of unromantic actuality comes early to
Laura in "The Garden Party." For Monica Tyrell of "Revelations" it comes
late. Attended by an indulgent husband and a French maid, Monica at her
dressing table can afford smug affirmations: "all this vibrating, trembling,
exciting, flying world was hers. It was her kingdom. No, no, she belonged
to nobody but Life." But that conviction is spoiled by her favorite hairdresser,
who fails to extend his usual flatteries because he is distracted by grief over
the sudden death of his daughter.
The unnamed woman of "The Escape" is forced to endure the sight of
the poor at a French train station—"those hideous children waving,. .. that
baby with that awful, awful head," the driver with "boils on his reddish
neck." It is a sight which seems designed to torment her: " 'Oh, why am
I made to bear these things? Why am I exposed to them? ' " An adulterous
affair puts the young woman of "This Flower" into the hands of a shady
doctor. Her tolerance and courage contrast sharply with her lover's concern
for appearances, and his cowardice makes this story one of Katherine Mans
field's sharper critiques of the aggressive male.
Charity—or at least charitable thoughts—often wins in the struggle be
tween the shallow urge to demonstrate patrician responsibility and the self
indulgent satisfaction in one's own comfort. But the victory is always brief.
In a household of Sheridans, Laura can be the "sensitive one" in only
limited ways and for a limited time; the working class can be "ever so nice"

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Katherine Mansfield: The Triumph of Egoism 19

only so long as its members work for her pleasure and in her context. Once
away from the banked flowers, trellises, shimmering lights and colors of a
manicured garden, their life is trailed by dingy footpaths, soot and grime,
cramped houses, and sudden death. Benevolence is just as fleeting for Rose
mary Fell of "A Cup of Tea," who patronizingly invites a thin, hungry woman
home to tea. Her presumptuous plans to care for her end when her husband
finds the creature "astonishingly pretty." Instead of receiving the compas
sionate treatment she is led to expect, the poor woman is hurried off into the
night with a gift of three pound-notes.
The Mediterranean discoveries of George and Fanny of "Honeymoon" are
blunted by the mere presence of a singer on the restaurant terrace, a frail
old man in shabby clothes who sings in a voice without talent or hope: "It
wavered, beat on, touched the high notes, fell again, seemed to implore,
to entreat, to beg for something, and then the tune changed, and it was re
signed, it bowed down, it knew it was denied." The episode comes close to
spoiling the entire honeymoon. Fanny is also the "sensitive one":

Is life like this too? thought Fanny. There are people like this. There is
suffering. And she looked at that gorgeous sea, lapping the land as though
it loved it, and the sky, bright with the brightness before evening. Had
she and George the right to be so happy? Wasn't it cruel? There must be
something else in life which made all these things possible. What was it?

II

I have said that these three types of narrative demonstrate a wider range
in her art than Katherine Mansfield is usually credited with having. But in
another sense there is a quality of the writing which does alert us, which
makes us realize that there is something called "a Mansfield story," and its
defining resonance makes the operable range even more restricted than that
of her contemporaries. Whatever the status of its characters, each story pro
jects an emotional context which cuts across social and economic boundaries.
In fashionable houses or shabby flats, the great common emotion is loneli
ness; when it is in fact not a present and realized state, it is not far away, (
potential and richly threatening. !|
The pervasiveness of this emotional context is, I thin
an obvious one—to the problem of autobiography in Ka
career: the extent, that is, to which the art is transposed
of that transposition. It accounts, in other words, for n
egoistic character of the stories but also their control, t
ness, which prevents the infections of her life from inv
From the beginning, even her less astute critics were
an apparent lack of sympathy behind the stories. As
radical disinterestedness was a perfectly acceptable, even
ial attitude in satiric sketches such as those found in In
her more developed narratives, however, suggested a cr
pronounced as to render suspect those emotional momen
toward which all aspects of the stories moved. One rev
complained of a "felinity" both "delicate and futile" wh

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 20 Katherine Mansfield: The Triumph of Egoism

lection. Final aesthetic judgments aside, it was a perceptive observation which

was to be even more applicable to the "Marriage à la Mode" sort of story
in the next volume, The Garden Party (1922). Another critic, referring to
the childhood-oriented stories set in New Zealand, detected an emphasis on
the immediacy of the vignette-like stances in characters seemingly abstracted
from "the world they belong to," isolated from the "others" who, even if
they are not actually present, are necessarily felt as part of a society.
But if the socially insulated Burnells seem self-sufficient to a fault in "At
the Bay" and other stories transparently drawn from Katherine Mansfield's
family, those who dominate "Bliss," "Marriage à la Mode," and other stud
ies of husbands and wives are even further detached from a supportive soci
ety. Such couples are self-sufficient in a chilling, almost pre-Existential way.
In the moment of crisis—and it can be spontaneous joy as well as sudden
despair—the illumination breaks upon the reader's consciousness even before
it comes to the heroine's: she is alone. This is as true of Bertha in "Bliss"
as it is of the protagonists of "Revelations" or "The Escape" or "Je ne parle
pas français." And what these narratives assert is the inevitability of further
loneliness, deeper estrangement. Deterioration in human relationships assumes
almost the status of natural law in "Ma Parker," "The Lady's Maid," "Pic
tures," and "Miss Brill." A notable paradox, then, of Katherine Mansfield's
I fiction, dealing as it does with domestic relationships, is the absence of
trusting friends or spouses. Prefigured as early as "The Woman at the
Store," a muted melodramatic piece done in the naturalistic manner, and
most starkly and interestingly rendered in "Je ne parle," the Mansfield hero
ine is spiritually cut loose from nourishing human ties.
But out of the stresses of abandonment comes resilience, a strength created
by the embattled self. In a sense, Katherine Mansfield is the most egocentric
writer of her time. What is important, however, is not so much that her letters
and journal corroborate this fact (much less that they show a difficult woman
having difficulties with everyone around her, including Middleton Murry),
but that the impressive fiction which emerges out of those intense privacies
is really fiction rather than disguised spiritual autobiography. There are con
siderably more crises in Katherine Mansfield's life than in her art, and
each one is apparently recorded—somewhere—in relentless detail. Although
it is sometimes strident, her own recording more often than not shows a
matter-of-factness, almost as if the act of cataloging symptoms, reactions,
moods becomes an aid for coming to terms with her illness. But the fiction,
however close to real or imagined moments in the life, has little explicit
relationship to such crises. By the miracle of imaginative transformation, the
fiction is purified of blatant hates, fears, and despairs.
There was in Katherine Mansfield a sensitized, almost abnormal alertness
to both ineradicable ugliness and potential beauty and the conditions which
gave birth to them. Fully knowledgeable about this quality in herself, she
once formulated it in terms relevant to her art as her two "kick offs" in
"the writing game." The first was "joy," which captured "something delicate
and lovely" opening before her eyes, and the second was "an extremely deep
sense of hopelessness, of everything doomed to disaster, almost wilfully, stu
pidly. .. ."3 Her work in this second key she identified as "a cry against
:Uhid., p. 106.

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Katherine Mansfield: The Triumph of Egoism 21

corruption" (and corruption is a recurring word throughout her published

papers). In 1918 she came as close as she was ever to do in formulating
a credo:

Although life is loathsomely ugly and people are terribly often vile and
cruel and base, nevertheless there is something at the back of it all—
which if only I were great enough to understand would make every
thing, everything, indescribably beautiful. One just has glimpses, divine
warnings—signs—... .*

She was not, of course, "great enough" either to understand such an am

bitious transcendental doctrine or to forge an aesthetics for articulating it.
But neither was she content to risk everything on "glimpses, divine warnings
—signs—...Feeling that the surest corrective to ill-defined impulses of
emotion lay in craftsmanship, she defended her commitment to technique in
words that combine the truth of those momentary "glimpses" with the tough
minded recognition that to communicate them required hard work. "I do
[believe in technique]," she once wrote, "just because I don't see how art
is going to make that divine spring into the bounding outline of things if it
hasn't passed through the process of trying to become these things before
recreating them."5 And as early as 1913 her defense of form figuratively
revoked the "licence" of the continuators of the Victorian novel tradition
"to spread over and flop and roll about" in their work.6
It is worth noting, I think, that Katherine Mansfield never betrays any
personal urge toward the novel—that most social of literary genres—al
though at one short period in her career she read voraciously and reviewed
discriminatingly the novels of her contemporaries. Unerringly, she chose the
short story as the appropriate form for her vision, which was, in the most
neutral sense of the word, egoistic. In his biography, Anthony Alpers reports
that one of her teachers commented that this "plain" and "surly" schoolgirl
"put herself in too much" in her compositions; and although Katherine Mans
field understandably remembered this teacher with no affection, the observa
tion sounds right.7 Whether emphasizing joy or despair in her mature work,
either "kick off" behind her art is firmly private. Such all-encompassing, all
orienting privacy has been fully documented in her life through her own
words and the poignant testimony of the two people closest to her, her hus
band and Ida Baker. It is not merely that she disliked, in turn, the Germans,
the French, and the English, but that she as often as not resented Murry,
hated Ida Baker, and felt suffocated by other friends such as the Lawrences.
Personally and socially, the world of Katherine Mansfield was comprised of
Katherine Mansfield—her dreams and nightmares, her projections, her en
tertainments of disaster and ecstasy.
From her life it is clear that the generative raw material for the fiction
lay in few situations external to her most immediate concerns. Even her
much-sought-after "experience" triggered long-standing convictions and needs

*Ibid., p. 182.
''Ibid., p. 74_~~
"Ibid., p. 4.
7Anthony Alpers, Katherine Mansfield: A Biography (New York, 1954), p. 50.

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22 Katherine Mansfield: The Triumph of Egoism

instead of supplying fresh subjects. Not that the often harrowing occurrences
in her life were too thin for aesthetic exploitation. They include her first
marriage, a painful and enforced stay in wartime Paris (prolonged by both
German guns and French bureaucrats), two abortions (one of them "pro
fessionally" administered), frenetic on-and-off friendships with other writers
(some of them frauds), and a series of dubious treatments by doctors (most
of them frauds). Though some of these events are fully recorded in the
letters and journal, their place in the stories is in the coolly diffused texture
of a recurring theme: Woman Alone. Absorbed and distributed, such bio
graphical events show up in both the emotional context of loneliness and
the "feline" control through which she managed to distance it.
Walter Sullivan, writing on the limited scope of the short story, has stated
that this genre "finds its true domain in the narrow confines of the heart."8
It is an apt statement, and if it can be applied to the stories of Katherine
Mansfield, as I believe it can be, we need not worry about her reputation.
It might be argued that the earlier critics were right—that the remarkable
control and accuracy of insight cannot outweigh the consistent lack of warmth
even in her best half-dozen stories. But another case might better be made.
The control and insight are of a piece with the chilly detachment, and only
by momentarily transcending the isolated self and its agonies could Katherine
Mansfield produce stories stripped of the psychic excesses of her own des
perate life.
Furthermore, this is work (as is that of Flannery O'Connor, more recently)
which is not notably illuminated by our conventional studies of artistic
development. Though the tone of the later stories grows more assured, it is
arguable that they become more accomplished in general technique. Certainly
there is no widening out in their themes as a result of "experience," some
of it hideous enough for two naturalistic novelists. The sense of a supportive
society is equally remote in the last stories (even in those she left unfinished)
and in the early ones. Given her rather special genius, the necessary tactic
was to deepen, not widen. In Katherine Mansfield's fiction there is no por
trait of an "arty generation" or of any other kind; there is only the portrait
of the author.
Though she may have been a wistful, despairing woman for most of her
brief life, she was also a willful, undespairing artist, whose contributions to
our knowledge of the heart are finally about the conduct not of social classes
but of human beings, caught in small moments charged with implications
rippling through and beyond the boundaries of a single consciousness. Her
stories, even some of the frailer ones, can still be read with both interest
and admiration, partly because Katherine Mansfield learned that egocentri
city in life is not the same thing as creative egoism. The first is oppressively
demonstrated in the private utterances; the second constitutes a minor tri
umph of the romantic sensibility.

Indiana University

8Walter Sullivan, " 'Where Have All the Flowers Gone?' " Sewanee Review, 78
(Autumn, 1970), 654.

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