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Summary Katherine Mansfield Selected Stories
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KATHERINE MANSFIELD - SELECTED STORIESTuesday, 18 May 2021 11:00
BACKGROUND
Early Background
- October 14, 1888
- Wellington, New Zealand
- Grew up in colonial background
- Cello lessons and interest of music career
- Queen's College in London
○ Ida Baker - close friend
Life in London
- Persuades her father to return to London in July, 1908
- Garnet Trowell & falls pregnant in 1908
- Leaves George Bowden in March 1909
- Miscarries in the summer of 1909
- Publishes In a German Pension 1911
John Middleton Murry
- Became a lodger in her home in April 1912
- Publishes stories in Rhythm and later joins the editorial team
- Marries Murry on May 3 1918
The Bloomsburries
- Publishes Prelude with The Hogarth Press
- Affiliation with the Woolf's
After the War
- November 11, 1918
- Murry stays in London; Mansfield travels with Ida Baker
- Couple infrequently live together between 1919-1922
Context
- Bliss and Other Stories - 1920
- The Garden Party and Other Stories - 1922
- Dies January 9, 1923 at 35
THE SHORT STORY
- Short prose narratives
- Brief
- Lack of resolution/conflicts
Modernism & the Short Story
- Disruptions in narrative flow
○ Linear chronology may be broken down
○ A sense of resolution is often omitted or deferred
○ Perspectival changes are not always clear
- Fragmentation
○ The expected unity/wholeness of the narrative flow
○ The assumed unity/wholeness of a character
- Ambiguity and complexity
○ Fragmentation and disruption resist simple definition for both formal and thematic elements
Mansfield often uses:
- Free Indirect Discourse
, ○ Instances when a character's thoughts and attitudes infiltrate the narration, blurring boundaries between
description and experience
- The depiction of the perceptions and lived perspective of individuals
○ The movement towards "show, don't tell"
- The relationship + interactions between people
○ The influence which these lived perspectives have on how people engage with each other
"What the writer does is not so much to solve the question but to put the question."
- 'Moments of being'
○ Functions as a technique that enact the experience of its happening (not telling us what is happening)
○ Emergence of ambiguous glimpses into complex possibilities of self and consciousness
(Grey, 2011:79)
PRELUDE (1918 + The Aloe)
- 'Prelude': a preliminary action, or condition, preceding and introducing one of more importance, an
introduction; a preface; a precursor
○ To play
- 3 generations:
○ Grandmother
○ Aunt and Mother
○ Daughters
- First scene:
○ Through Linda's eyes
○ Introduces thematic + formal feelings of fragmentation/disruption as structure/characters is broken
down
Home address
○ Box marks boundary
Brings something old into new
○ Kezia contemplates new use
Future adventure and discovery
○ Empty house becomes an uncertain space
"wind snuffles and howls"
Kezia's uncertainty highlights
□ Lived experience of child
Excitement, wonder, fear
◊ Unknown and unfamiliar
She is quite playful with interactions in house
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