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Katherine Mansfield and Modernism in the Short

Story

Timothy Sexton, Yahoo Contributor Network

Apr 9, 2008 "Share your voice on Yahoo websites. Start Here."
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The standard methodology of the short story previous to the era of
Modernism had been to achieve the effect of condensation of the
larger world into the compactness afforded by the inherent brevity of
the form. Unlike a novel which can span time and space and have the
luxury of rabbit trails to be followed and forgotten, the short story by
its very nature demands contraction. Modernism works in some ways
to invert this idea by exploding the minute into the vast. One of the
key elements of Katherine Mansfield's short fiction is the
amplification of the small moment into one of universal significance.
This alienating irony is facilitated through a Modernist usage of
language that pares away the chaff so that the only thing left are
almost skeletal stalks of linguistic wheat. Mansfield can take a
seemingly uncomplicated item and transform it into something that
extends both the social status of a character while also commenting
on the larger issues associated with class. It is not the fact that a
character can easily afford an entire jar of roses that has significance;
it is that lilacs she rejects are a less impressive symbol of status and
bearing. Then there is the aesthetic quality associated with roses and
lilacs and those qualities are consistent with the deeply ironic tone the
story takes from the beginning. Roses are beautiful; lilacs at best
merely pretty.

Ironic detachment and alienation are, of course, integral ingredients

in the Modernist stew of literary endeavors, and into this melting pot
Katherine Mansfield adds a bit more than a pinch of something else.
The implied reader is invited to associate with the narrator not just as
a strategy to explore the otherness of characters, but also to comment
upon the elevated self-esteem of the protagonist as well. There is a
thrust of the gossipy to the narrative in the opening salvos of many of
her stories.
The reader is essentially seen as a subversive co-efficient in a
conversational undertone. This is especially easy for Mansfield to
accomplish because it requires a focus on character rather than plot
and that is on view in full force in all of her stories. And then, as if
making the theoretical concept of alienation concrete, Mansfield often
abruptly abandons this tone and embraces stream-of-consciousness'
most effective feature, that of the effortless transition from the mind
of one character to another. In an instant, just when it seems the
irony of a Mansfield story will be directed toward a distanced
enjoyment of the fall of the mighty, the reader is thrust into the
consciousness of that very person.
All too often in works written in the Modernist mode, this transition
accomplishes estrangement from the text and little else, but when
done in an accessible style the focus of the estrangement is centered
on the jarring dislocation of contemporary society that these tonal
leaps are intended to convey. This Katherine Mansfield accomplishes,
no doubt in part because her subjects are far more accessible than the
mythic works of Joyce or Eliot.
One of the primary themes in play in many stories in the Mansfield
canon is that of disintegration in the word's most universal sense.
What disintegrates in a Mansfield story is not just a relationship, but
the psychic disintegration of the individual. That corruption of
consciousness is bursting with irony in the sense that a character may
appear throughout the story to be as fully integrated a human being
as one might ever hope to come across. What one usually overlooks
when reading a story of disintegration is that, by definition, there can
be no deconstruction of an entity that is only partially completed;
disintegration requires an integrated unit.

What is taking place in this disintegration is an ironic inversion of

what may well be the single most primal Modernist motif. Modernism
takes it name from the modern world of the 20th century that seemed
to, in almost the blink of an eye, make every facet of life that came
before nearly obsolete. It is worth remembering that even within the
tragically short life span of Katherine Mansfield she witnessed such
extraordinary historical shifts as the cessation of the millennia-long
dependence upon horses for transportation in exchange for the
automobile, as well as the inventions or everyday applications of
everything from the electric light bulb and the cinema to the
telephone and refrigeration.
To put it simply but truthfully Katherine Mansfield witnessed the
birth of the modern age and the rejection of much of the world into
which she herself was born. Modernism, then, achieves its effect
through conscious creation that situates itself as not just different
from old world beliefs and values, but as something that is better than
those nostalgic ideals.