Katherine Mansfield Essay Example for Free

Katherine Mansfield raiseShe was born in 1888 in Wellington, a town labeled the empire city by its dust coat inhabitants, who modeled themselves on British invigoration and relished their citys bourgeois respectability. 1 At an early age, Mansfield witnessed the disconnection between the colonial and the native, or Maori, airs of breeding, prompting her to criticize the treatment of the Maoris in several diary entries and short stories.2 Mansfields biographer, Angela Smith, writes It was her childhood experience of living in a society where one way of bread and butter was enforce on another, and did not quite fit in that sharpened her modernist impulse to direction on moments of disruption or encounters with strange or disturbing aspects of life. 3 Her feelings of disjuncture were accentuated when she arrived in Britain in 1903 to pick up Queens College. In numerous respects, Mansfield remained a lifelong outsider, a traveler between cardinal seemingly similar yet pro foundly different worlds.After briefly returning to New Zealand in 1906, she moved back to Europe in 1908, living and writing in England and patchs of continental Europe. Until her premature death from tuberculosis at the age of 34, Mansfield remained in Europe, leading a Bohemian, unconventional way of life. The house servant Picturesque Mansfields short story Prelude is set in New Zealand and dramatizes the disjunctures of colonial life through an account of the Burnell familys move from Wellington to a country village.The story takes its title from Wordsworths seminal poem, The Prelude, the set-back version of which was completed in 1805, which casts the poet as a traveler and chronicles the growth of a poets mind. 4 Although the Burnell family moves a mere six miles from town, the move is not inconsequential it enacts a break with their previous way of life and alerts the family members to the variant discontinuities in their lives. Beneath the veneer of the Burnells harmoni ous domestic life be faint undercurrents of aggression and unhappiness.The haunting specter of a mysterious aloe plant and a slaughtered duck in their well-manicured curtilage suggests that the familys aw amply nice new-fashioned home conceals moments of brutality and ignorance toward another way of life that was suppressed and denied. 5 As I will propose, these two incidents echo the aesthetical concept of the rattling(a), as they close in a mysterious power that idolatrys its beholders and cannot be fully contained within their hand whatever home.Through her baffling, dream- interchangeable prose, Mansfield deploys traditional aesthetic conventions like the elegant while simultaneously transfiguring, subverting, and reinventing them in a modernist context. The concept of the picturesque was first delimit by its originator, William Gilpin, an 18th century artist and clergyman, as that kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture. 6 Thus, a scene or representation is be autiful when it echoes an already-established, artistic conception of beauty, dampening the self-reinforcing way in which art creates the measuring rod of beauty for both art and life.Mansfield presents these picturesque moments in order to demystify them and reveal the suppression and violence they contain. In addition to Prelude, her stories Garden Party and Bliss dramatize the transformation and eversion of picturesque moments of bourgeois life and domestic harmony. While she seems to exhibit a certain attachment to these standard aesthetic forms, Mansfield subtly interrogates many of these conventions in a strikingly modernist way. Through her childhood in a colony, Mansfield besides became attuned to the violence and inequalities of colonialism.As Angela Smith suggests, her early writings demonstrate a keen aesthesia towards a oppress history of brutality and duplicity. 7 In her 1912 short story How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped, she questions and all overturns the survey of the colonialist, whose vantage point historically trumps that of the native. The deliberate ambivalence of the word kidnapping dramatizes the conflict between the settlers perspective and Pearls joyful, eye-opening experiences during her abduction. In a similar way, empire dramatized for Mansfield the way that a picturesque, bourgeois household could suppress alternative perspectives.The Sublime In Prelude, the mysterious, terrific aloe plant disrupts the pleasant domesticity of the Burnell household. Their well-manicured yard with its tennis lawn, garden, and orchard also contains a wild, unseemly sidethis was the frightening side, and no garden at all. 8 This side contains the aloe plant, which exerts a mysterious, enthralling power over its awed beholders. In its resemblance to the ocean, the aloe assumes the characteristics of the sublime the high school grassy bank on which the aloe rested rose up like a wave, and the aloe seemed to ride upon it like a shop with the oars l ifted.Bright moonlight hung upon the lifted oars like water, and on the green wave glittered the dew. 9 For many writers and poets, the ocean was a manifestation of the sublime because of its immeasurable power and scale that awed and humbled its observers. The aloes strikingly physiological effect on its viewers recalls Edmund Burkes sublime, which overpowers its observer and reinforces the limitations of human reasonableness and control. In his famous treatise on the sublime, Burke writes greatness of dimension, vastness of extent or quantity is a powerful cause of the sublime, as it embodies the violent and overpowering forces of nature.10 In a similar vein, the child, Kezia Burnells first impression upon seeing the fat swelling plant with its cruel leaves and fleshy stem is one of awe and wonder. 11 In this case, the sublimity of the aloe plant disrupts and challenges the domestic picturesque as it defies mastery, categorization, and traditional notions of beauty. In its resis tance to categorization and control, the sublime embodies the part of the ungovernable landscape that the Burnell family cannot domesticate and the picturesque cannot frame.As a result, in Prelude, the magnitude of the sublime interrupts and fractures the tranquil surface of the picturesque by exposing the unfathomable depths beneath it. The colonial backdrop of the Burnells yard also contributes to the mysterious, occult power of the aloe. This unruly part of their property hints toward a landscape that eludes domestication and serves as a constant reminder that the Burnell family is living in a land that is not quite theirs and cannot be fully tamed.12 At the age of 19, Mansfield wrote that the New Zealand bush outside of the cities is all so gigantic and tragicand blush in the bright sunlight it is so passionately secret. 13 For Mansfield, the bush embodies the history of a people whose lives look at been interrupted and disset(p) by European settlers. 14 After wars, brutal col onial practices, and European diseases had devastated the local Maori population, the bush became a haunting monument to their presence.As the Burnell family settles down to sleep on the first night in their new home, far away in the bush there sounded a harsh rapid chatter Ha-ha-ha Ha-ha-ha. 15 In her subtle way, Mansfield unveils the voices of those whose perspectives atomic number 18 excluded from this portrait of nocturnal domestic harmony. In a similar way, the aloe plant exudes an unfathomable history that is beyond the time and place of the Burnells. Even its ageimplied by the detail that it flowers once every(prenominal) hundred yearssuggests that the aloe exists on a different scale than its human beholders.16 In its ancient, superhuman scale, the aloe gestures towards the gigantic, indicating a subtle, but implicitly threatening power within, or in proximity of the home. The aloe is a kind of blank in the imperial landscape of New Zealand, whose power threatens the col onial household and its control over the landscape. 17 By disrupting and encroaching upon the ostensibly safe domestic sphere, the aloe also echoes the unheimlich, or uncanny, an aesthetic concept explored by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay, The Uncanny. The uncanny becomes, in part, an invasive force violating the sacred, domestic sphere and hearkens back to a previously repressed or hidden impulse The uncanny is someaffair which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light. 18 In Prelude, the aloe is initially depicted as a threatening force that might have had claws instead of roots. The curving leaves seemed to be hiding something. 19 Positioned within the safe space of their property, the aloe is a menacing, ungovernable force that seems to encroach upon it.The plant becomes part of the repressed history of the landscapea history that is lone(prenominal) app arnt to Kezia, her mother Linda Burnell, and her grandmother Mrs. Fairfield, who are attuned to the forces below the surface of the picturesque exterior. Violent Underpinnings Beneath many of Mansfields picturesque domestic scenes are moments of violence and rupture. In Garden Party, for instance, a poor man falls to his death during the preparations for a much-anticipated complaisant gathering of the wealthy Sheridan family, undermining the convivial spirit of the occasion.In Prelude, Pat, the handyman, slaughters a duck while the children watch with fantastic enthrallment as it waddles for a few steps after being decapitated. The crowning wonder of the asleep(predicate) duck walking hearkens back to Burkes sublime, which is experienced in Prelude within the enclosure of the private residence. 20 The sublimity of this apparent defiance of the properties of death acts as a dramatic external force fantastic on the observers intellect and reason in a profoundly Burkian way.But later that night, when the duck is placed in front of the patriarch, Stanley Burnell, it did not look as if it had ever had a head. 21 The ducks picturesque dressingits legs tied together with a piece of string and a wreath of little balls of stuffing round itconceals its violent death. 22 In a similar way, the awfully nice picturesque house is imposed upon the landscape, as if it had never been any other way. 23 Through reconfiguration and transformation, a new imperial order conceals the fact that an older order once lay beneath it.In both cases, the picturesque functions as a way of naturalizing the violent order of domination. As Pats golden earrings distract Kezia from her grief over the ducks death, the ducks pretty garnish conceals its basted resignation. 24 There is no much(prenominal) thing as a pure aesthetics, Mansfield seems to suggest, as each serene moment is implicated in some act of violence, brutality, or suppression. In Prelude, the good-natured Pat disrupts a pre-existing picturesque scene in which ducks preen their dazzling breasts amidst the pools and bushes of yellow flow ers and blackberries.25 Tellingly, the duck pond contains a bridge, a typical feature of the picturesque that reconciles or bridges the gap between different aspects of the scenery. In this way, the Burnell familys cultivation of the land by planting and slaughtering ducks disrupts another underlying order. Their unquestioning appropriation of this pre-existing order mirrors the way colonial life disrupted and undermined the indigenous Maori life. Juxtaposing two picturesque scenes that interrupt and conflict with one another, Mansfield questions and unravels the conventional image of the picturesque.This interplay of various conflicting aesthetic orders constitutes part of Mansfields modernist style, in which aesthetic forms are ruptured, fragmented, and overturned. As the yards landscape bears traces of the Maori past, so the quiet harmony of the Burnells domesticity is underscored by deep, unspoken tensions and an animosity that hints at the uncanny. In fact, the only character w ho expresses any contentment is Stanley, who reflects, By God, he was a perfect fool to feel as happy as this 26 Yet even he shudders upon entering his new driveway, as a port of panic overtook Burnell whenever he approached near home.27 Beneath this veneer of marital bliss and familial harmony, his wife Linda at times ignores her children and expresses hatred towards her husband and his aggressive sexuality there were times when he was frighteningreally frightening. When she screamed at the top of her voice, You are killing me. 28 Meanwhile Stanley and Beryl, Lindas sister, seem to have a flirtatious, indecent descent Only last night when he was reading the paper her false self had stood beside him and leaned against his shoulder on purpose.Hadnt she put her hand over his so that he should see how white her hand was beside his embrown one. 29 Dramatizing these dynamics, Mansfield suggests that a happy household outside of town is not as dirt cheap as Stanley boasts it comes at the cost of servitude, sexual aggression, and a ravaged Maori landscape. 30 Through these layers, which Mansfield subtly strips off one at a time, she artfully exposes the way that an existing political and aesthetic order is not what it seems to be or how it has always been.Her short stories are fraught with their own tensions while exposing the picturesque as false and absurd, she even so draws on its conventional associations. Similarly, her subtle attempts to question colonial power are embedded in a seemingly idealized portrait of colonial life. Mansfield creates a seemingly beautiful or normal image, such as the happy family in Prelude, Bliss, or Garden Party, and then slowly challenges it through a subtle counter-narrative.In this way, her deployment of modernist techniques is less pronounced than that of James Joyce and her other modernist contemporaries. Just as she challenges aesthetic conventions, Mansfield unravels the readers ideas about her own stories by presenting a seemingly beautiful, transparent narrative that is haunted by tensions, lacunae, and opacity. deal the headless walking duck, these fictions of transparency and harmony quickly collapse upon closer inspection.