KM and The Aesthetic Object

Victoria University of Wellington
Journal of New Zealand Literature
Katherine Mansfield and the Aesthetic Object

Author(s): J. Lawrence Mitchell
Source: Journal of New Zealand Literature (JNZL), No. 22 (2004), pp. 31-54
Published by: Journal of New Zealand Literature and hosted by Victoria University of
Wellington
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Katherine Mansfield and the Aesthetic
Object
J. Lawrence Mitchell
Filtered through the prism of material culture studies, the

renewed interest in literary aesthetics has generated increasingly
fruitful discussion of the aestheticized or aesthetic object. The
focus here is Katherine Mansfield's response to and treatment of
certain everyday objects?with particular attention to the 'litde
lamp' of 'The Doll's House'?and the significance of such
objects in her fiction and to her life. It is not my intention to
claim that Mansfield was altogether unique in her response to the
material world; after all, she shared D. H. Lawrence's
'extraordinary sensitiveness to what Wordsworth called
"unknown modes of being"' (Aldington 1950:7). Rather I would
offer one kind of answer to the question posed by Virginia
Woolf in The Waves: 'But what is the thing that lies beneath the
semblance of the thing?'
In his autobiographical Montmartre A Vingt Ans (1938),
Francis Careo, a friend and one-time lover of Mansfield, records
his awareness of her hyper-sensitivity in the following terms:
'Elle ?prouvait une tendresse pour les choses quotidiennes les
plus humbles' (p. 186). One special manifestation of that
'tendresse' was the capacity to invest inanimate objects with life
and even to enter into, to take possession of, them. Mansfield's
letter to the painter, Dorothy Brett (11 October 1917) about her
still life paintings, provides a prime example:
What can one do, faced with this wonderful tumble of

round bright fruits, but gather them and play with
them?and become them, as it were. When I pass the
31
Journal of New Zealand Uterature
apple stalls, I cannot help stopping and staring until I

feel that I, myself, am changing into an apple too?and
that any moment I may produce an apple, miraculously,
out of my own being like the conjuror produces the egg
{Collected Utters \\ 330; henceforth CL).
Much the same process of sympathetic identification occurs with

animals too, so that, as Mansfield adds in the same letter, 'when I
write about ducks I swear that I am a white duck.' As these
examples show, such imaginative sympathy was not confined to
her fiction. Yet it seems to have been a fundamental feature of
Mansfield's creative sensibility and certainly makes its first
appearance very early, in a vignette originally published in The
Native Companion, 1 October 1907: 'Strange, as I sit here, quiet,
alone, how each possession of mine?the calendar gleaming
whitely on the wall, each picture, each book, my 'cello case, the
very furniture?seems to stir into life' (Stone 1977:28-29). It is
hardly surprising, then, to find that, in 'Prelude,' one of her best
known stories, Mansfield's sensibility is transferred to Linda
Burnell, the neurotically vapid mother, where it is represented as
something of a mixed blessing, amounting at times to an
affliction. When Linda traces a poppy on the wallpaper with her
finger, the poppy seems to come alive in a manner eerily
reminiscent, to the contemporary reader, of a similar incident in
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper':
'Things had a habit of coming alive like that. Not only

large substantial things like furniture, but curtains and
the patterns of stuffs and the fringes of quilts and
cushions
[. . .] How often the medicine bottles had turned into a

row of little men with brown top-hats on;' {Prelude 27).
Linda's affliction is, it seems, the very superfluity of her

imagination?and at times she is overwhelmed by it to the point
32
of paralysis. Yet Mansfield seems determined to identify in Linda

a familial, not just an individual, pattern of response. It is from
Linda's mother, Mrs Fairfield, we are to understand, that she has
inherited her pathological fear of things that swell?another
version of 'coming alive'?as her daughter, Kezia, has, in turn,
inherited the fear from her, along with the same oppressive
dreams. Linda's dream of walking in a daisy-strewn garden with
her father, for example, becomes a nightmare when the 'tiny
bird' cupped in her hands 'grew bigger and bigger' until 'it had
become a baby with a big naked head and a gaping bird-mouth,
opening and shutting' (Prelude 24). The dual symbolism of the
dream?'tumescence and its consequences,' as Vincent
O'Sullivan labels it?is fairly transparent (Pilditch 1996:147). In
the real world of daytime, mother and daughter?first Linda and
Kezia, then Mrs Fairfield and Linda?must confront their fears
together, fears that focus on a monstrously overgrown aloe,
unwelcome denizen of what should have been a prelapsarian
garden. Linda's apparent enthusiasm for this 'fat swelling plant'
[Prelude 36) is misleading, since it is an enthusiasm that
transparently derives from a very different characteristic of the
plant?its legendary infertility. As Linda assures her daughter
with a smile, the aloe flowers only once every one hundred years.
This response must be interpreted in light of the likelihood that
she is pregnant?a condition that would explain her inability to
contribute to the removal of the household to Karori as well as
her general lassitude. Later, in the reassuring presence of her
own mother, Linda will find the imaginative power to transform
the plant into the mast of a ship in which she 'rowed far away
over the top of the garden trees' (Prelude 60). Here imagination
approaches magic.
The presence of this monster in the garden is no accident, of
course: it is there to counterpoint what we might term the
Burnell aesthetic of the miniature. The embodiment of this
aesthetic is Kezia?Mansfield's most endearing projection and
the key figure in Trelude,' At The Bay,' and 'The Doll's House.'
33
In Trelude,' for example, it is Kezia who rescues a litde pill-box

from what had been her parents' bedroom in their just vacated
house, thinking 'I could keep a bird's egg in that' (p. 12); it is
Kezia who asks for an empty match-box in which to create a
floral tribute for her grandmother (p. 35); and it is Kezia who is
distracted from her first encounter with death?the beheading of
the duck?by 'the litde round gold ear-rings' (p. 53) of Pat, the
executioner handyman. Above all, it is Kezia to whom her
grandmother entrusts 'the litde lamp' which will light the way
into their new home in Karori and which will, in miniaturized
form, become Kezia's sacred object in 'The Doll's House.'
Where the miniature is so privileged, it stands in opposition to
what Susan Stewart, calls 'the gigantic': 'The gigantic is viewed
as a consuming force, the antithesis of the miniature, whose
objects offer themselves to the viewer in a utopia of perfect,
because individual, consumption' (1993:86). For Stewart, the locus
classicus is Gullivers Travels, with its transparent opposition
between Lilliputian and Brobdignagian worlds. By contrast,
Mansfield's work internalizes this opposition within everyday
objects of the natural world. Alice in Wonderland would thus be a
closer analogue than Gullivers Travels. Anything in Mansfield's
stories interpretable as movement towards the gigantic?a
growing bird, a swelling aloe, a poppy that comes alive?must
therefore be seen as implicidy threatening. We are made to see
that for Kezia the danger lies within?if she is overwhelmed by
her fears she will become her mother, Linda. But the miniature,
in its various manifestations, is apotropaic and can save her.
In Trelude,' Mansfield's true aesthetic mentor is surely
Walter Pater, although the more outr? Oscar Wilde is usually
recognized as the primary influence upon her early work. Walter
Rippmann, her German teacher at Queen's College, introduced
her to Pater's work as well as to Wilde's and she showed her
appreciation by casting Rippmann as the 'Wanderer' in 'A Fairy
Story'?the man who helps the 'Girl' find herself through the
medium of books. A family letter and an entry in Mansfield's
34
journal provide the requisite documentary evidence of her

enthusiasm. Some time in May or June 1908, Mansfield wrote
from Wellington to her sister, Vera, of being possessed by 'quite
a mania for Walter Pater' (CL I: 46); and on 21 December of the
same year, newly setded in London, she wrote: 'I should like to
write a life much in the style of Walter Pater's Child in the House.
About a girl in Wellington; the singular charm and barrenness of
that place' (Journal 1954:37). 'Prelude,' clearly represents the
fulfillment of that desire. It certainly yields more than a few faint
echoes of 'The Child in the House,' the first of Pater's influential
'imaginary portraits,' originally published in Macmillans Magazine
in 1878; the two works share what Perry Meisel calls 'Pater's
characteristic hybrid of autobiography and fiction' (1980:44). To
Mansfield, 'The Child in the House' must have powerfully
evoked her experience and her sensibility as much as Pater's?
above all 'the wistful yearning towards home' which for her time
and distance exacerbated. Murry's overly facile account of the
change in Mansfield's attitude towards her native city and
country after her brother's death has led some to assume that
only his death dispelled her reservations about it. Yet her
manifest enthusiasm for 'The Child in the House' as early as
1908 tells a different story. Different as the two works are in
many particulars?there is, for example, nothing like Pater's
inclination towards religion in Prelude?they share a good deal.
Kezia's nostalgic return to the empty house from which the
family is moving draws upon a similar scene in Pater's narrative
in which Florian Deleal, as a child, returns to his empty house
and, wandering from room to room, is overwhelmed by a feeling
'so intense that he knew it would last long' (Buckler 1986:237).
And for all the distance that Pater tries to put between himself
and his creation, Florian is as much a self-portrait of the young
Pater as Kezia is of the young Mansfield. Kezia's peculiar delight
in discarded objects also matches Florian's in 'a treasure of fallen
acorns and black crow's feathers' (Buckler p. 229) and perfecdy
exemplifies Pater's claim that 'it is false to suppose that a child's
35
sense of beauty is dependent on any choiceness or special

fineness in the objects which present themselves to it' (Buckler
p. 225). Mansfield and her fictional alter egos consistendy show
that they share Pater's 'passionateness in his relation to fair
outward objects' as well as his 'longing for some undivined,
entire possession of them' (Buckler p. 231). Yet the significance
of 'The Child in the House' to the early sections of Prelude has
never been widely recognized. Vincent O'Sullivan appears to
have been the first to address the influence of Pater on
Mansfield, but Sydney Janet Kaplan (1991) provides perhaps the
most useful extended discussion. She sees Pater as a 'safer
model' than Wilde and argues that Mansfield's knowledge of
Pater came in part through her reading of Arthur Symons Studies
in Prose and Verse (1904).
Prelude was separately published in 1918, the third publication
of the fledgling Hogarth Press. It would have been the second,
had not Leonard Woolf decided to publish a memorial volume
of poems by his brother, Cecil, who had been killed in France by
a German shell in 1917 (Willis 1992:23). The evolution o? Prelude
was also intimately connected with the war. In March 1915,
Mansfield began what she intended to be her first novel, 'Karori,'
but which evolved into 'The Aloe' before it was set aside. Then
four months after the death of her younger brother, Leslie, in
October 1915, she began revising this manuscript with a new
and urgent purpose?to write 'a kind of long elegy' for her dead
brother. There had already been two losses among her
acquaintances (the poet Rupert Brooke and the painter Henri
Gaudier-Brzeska), as she was painfully aware, and there would be
others, among them Frederick Goodyear in 1917. As Mansfield
revised, she created a place for her brother's fictional counterpart
at the top of the nursery table, amongst the three litde girls under
the shadow of the lamp, and had Stanley Burnell, their father,
vow silendy: 'That's where my boy ought to sit' {Prelude 41). Of
course, the apparent pregnancy of his wife, Linda, renders this
observation something more than wishful thinking. And the
36
empty seat represents a good deal more than a father's desire for
a son; it hauntingly anticipates the birth of the brother whose
death it evokes and thereby represents the first step in the
compilation of the promised elegy of which 'The Doll's House'
would be the last.
Let us now turn to the 'litde lamp,' as it appears in 'The
Doll's House.' Claire Tomalin suggests that it had its genesis in
one of John Middleton Murry's 'stories of staggering ineptitude'
(1988:113) published in Rhythm. Any such borrowing seems
highly unlikely, given what is known of Mansfield's modus
operandi. In any case, the evidence that follows demonstrates the
anteriority of the image in Mansfield's writings, how deeply
embedded it was in her consciousness, and thus the tenuousness
of Tomalin's claim. Yet the symbolism of the enigmatic lamp
remains very much in question. Is it merely the object of a
capricious child's affection? Is it, as Mansfield's contemporary,
Gerald Bullett, would have it, 'the emblem of ecstasy, paradise,
the world's desire' (1926:111)? Does it stand for 'the
compensatory gift of vision' (Hankin 1983: 221)? Or does it
illustrate 'the classic association of lamps and knowledge'
(Fullbrook 1987:117)? However we interpret the object itself
within the story, it certainly has an aesthetic role, and it is that
role which concerns us primarily. The litde lamp perfecdy
exemplifies the twofold aestheticization so characteristic of
Mansfield's real-life response to the world of objects: the
aestheticization of the commonplace and of the miniature. Any
discussion of this neglected feature of Mansfield's fiction must
therefore begin with Mansfield's 'kick-off (her term) for the
story, that is to say Else's triumphant statement at the end of
'The Doll's House:' 'I seen the litde lamp' (p. 13) What the
despised Else [Kelvey], daughter of a washerwoman, shares with
Kezia, the litde girl who lives in a big house, is an aesthetic
response?an intuitive grasp of the importance of the litde lamp.
For the other children, the doll's house itself is the main
attraction; it is an object of curiosity, of course, and of envy, but
37
ultimately no more than a toy. For Kezia, on the other hand, the
doll's house re-inscribes the adult world in miniature and thereby
becomes accessible to her exquisite sensibility. The very fount
and source of power is the little lamp, that sacred object which
derives much of its portentousness from Kezia's mysterious and
inarticulable enthusiasm for it. Moreover, the ontological status
of Kezia's assertion that 'the lamp was real' (p. 3) must be
distinguished from that of earlier statements about 'real
windows' (p. 1) and 'real bedclothes' (p. 2). In the special reality
of the lamp we discern?along with Kezia and Else?something
of the numinous that is entirely lacking in quotidian objects such
as windows and bedclothes. Dunbar (1997) makes a similar point
in the service of a different argument: 'When Kezia affirms that
for her the lamp is "real" she is unknowingly using the word in
its old, idealistic sense' (p. 174-75).
The innocent intensity of the child's vision in the story
somehow seems sufficient; yet it masks an array of private
associations and pivotal moments in Mansfield's life, the
relevance of which has never been examined. We have to go
back to 10 July 1904 to locate the first un embellished reference
to the lamp, in a letter to Sylvia Payne, Mansfield's cousin,
describing the view from her bedroom window in Queen's
College hostel of 'the lamp in the Mews below' which she labels
'an old old comrade of mine' (CL I: 14). Oddly enough, the
name of the mews or alley was 'Mansfield Mews,' a fact which?
given the coincidence of family association?may account for
young Kathleen Beauchamp's special feeling for it and which
may even have been a hitherto unacknowledged factor in her
selection of 'Mansfield' as a 'nom de plume.' Three years later,
the same phrase has been incorporated, with writerly thrift, into
one of Mansfield's early vignettes for The Native Companion (1
October 1907): 'Down below, in The Mews, the little lamp is
singing a silent song' (cited in Stone p. 25). From its humble
beginnings as a commonplace street lamp emerges the first
version of the now domesticized and fully anthropomorphicized
38
'litde lamp' with its Whisderian luminosity. For many years this
image and the attendant phrase seem to have lain dormant in
Mansfield's imagination, until revivified under very different
circumstances during World War One. Increasingly disillusioned
with Murry's fecklessness and imagining herself in love with
Francis Careo, whom she had met in Paris through Murry,
Mansfield made what she later fictionalized as 'An Indiscreet
Journey' into the French Zone des Arm?es to spend a few days
with her own 'petit soldat.' Given the strong feelings provoked
by the war, it is hard not to see Mansfield's act as, at one level, a
gesture of solidarity with those who?like her brother and unlike
her English lover?had heeded the call to arms. In her 'Home
Diary for 1915,' towards the end of long entry for 20 February,
she recorded her impressions:
We spent a queer night. The room?the room. The litde

lamp, the wooden ceiling, the bouquets of pink daisies
that unfolded at dawn [. . . ] There was a fire in our room
and a tiny lamp on the table. The fire flickered on the
white wood ceiling. It was as though we were on a boat.
We talked in whispers, overcome by this discreet litde
lamp [. . .] It was so warm & delicious, lying curled in
each other's arms, by the light of the tiny lamp le fils de
Maeterlinck, only the clock & the fire to be heard
(Notebooks, 1997 II: 9-12).
In this account of the four-day tryst, the litde lamp is crucial to

the mood of intimacy and both conceals by its discretion and
reveals by its light. The evidence of the poem 'Secret Flowers,'
suggests that the light of love shone from the lamp: 'Is love a
light for me? A steady light, / A lamp within whose pallid pool I
dream over old love-books?' This poem was first published in
the Athenaeum, 22 July 1919. Given Vincent O'Sullivan's
observation in his 1988 edition that this was "the one
Athenaeum poem that Murry did not include in Poems 1923 or
1930 (p. 92), it appears highly likely that he had come to
39
associate the poem with Mansfield's tryst with Careo. Yet the
lamp apparendy remained too private a symbol to bear inclusion
in the fictional version of this notably 'indiscreet' journey. The
interpolated allusion in the entry to the Belgian symbolist,
Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949), is revealing: it suggests that
Mansfield somehow saw this idyllic moment in terms of
Maeterlinck's fatalistic belief in man's incapacity to understand
'the mystery of his destiny' or to control 'the obscure forces that
govern his life' (Braun 1964:277). No doubt she particularly had
in mind Maeterlinck's use of a symbolic lamp in such plays as
The Seven Princesses (1891), Pell?as et M?lisande (1892), and The Blue
Bird (1909).
When Leslie had arrived in England en route to the front in
France, Mansfield was?through memories shared with him?
able to rekindle her love of country and family. And from Leslie,
on a pretext, she borrowed the money to make the trip to Gray
to visit Francis Careo. He also gave her a hei tiki made of the
native pounamu or greenstone; in this pendant form it was
sometimes regarded as an amulet or charm intended to protect
its wearer against misfortune (see CL I: 52 note 10). This gift
became invested with special poignancy for Mansfield; for her
brother survived only a matter of weeks at the front?he was
killed demonstrating a hand-grenade to his men. By giving his
sister an object no doubt meant for his protection at the front,
had Leslie somehow sacrificed himself? This is the nature of the
question Mansfield may well have framed for herself when she
learned of his death. Besides the unbearable loss of a brother,
there was the kind of unassuagable guilt that survivors often
experience. No wonder, then, that?according to Ruth Mantz?
she wore the hei tiki round her neck until she died (1933:142).
Odette Lenoel (1946) dramatizes the connection between
Leslie's death and her wearing of the tiki: 'Depuis lors, sa
pr?sence ne l'avait plus jamais quitt?e, pas plus qu'elle n'avait
oubli? de mettre sur sa gorge le tiki de jade, l'amulette
polyn?sienne, que le jeune mort lui avait donn?e' (p. 14). From
40
one of her letters to Murry we know that she was wearing it on 4

June 1918, when 'the New Zealand stone' caught the eye of an
old man in Cornwall (CL II: 220). No wonder, too, that the
ghost of her dead brother supplanted Murry?the other
Bogey?in her affections. In her journal too she recorded a
conversation with Leslie in the garden of 5 Acacia Road in St.
John's Wood just before he left for the front: it amounted to a
game of 'Do You Remember,' inspiring fond recollections of the
sights and scents of home (Journal 1954: 83-85). From such grief
and memories emerged Mansfield's vow to pay her 'debt of love'
and to write an elegy as a memorial to him, one that would
necessarily be focused upon the family life they had shared so far
away (Journal 1954:94). In fact, memory was always central to the
creative impulse in Mansfield, as she reveals in a birthday letter
of 4 October 1921 to her sister: Ah, Jeanne, anyone who says
"do you remember" simply has my heart ... I remember
everything' (CL IV: 294).
One of the earliest sketches she produced towards that end
was 'A Recollection of Childhood,' which links the birth of her
sister Gwen with the arrival of a doll's house, the gift of a
neighbor, Mrs Heywood. From this account, dated February 17,
1916, we first learn of the existence of a 'doll's lamp' on the
bedroom table of the doll's house (Journal 1954:101-03). But, it
should be noted, this detail is not yet represented as any more
important than any other?the verandah, the balcony, the door
that opened and shut, and the two chimneys: 'I had gone all
through it [the doll's house] myself, from the kitchen to the
dining-room, up into the bedrooms with the doll's lamp on the
table, heaps and heaps of times' (Journal 1954:102). Ruth Mantz,
who did some of the most painstaking investigation of
Mansfield's early life, turned up another relevant detail in her
account of the Beauchamps' life at their new home, Chesney
Wold, in the country outside Wellington: 'There were only foot
paths and no street lights in Karori. At home they used big
lamps of the same sort as the litde lamp in the doll's house'
41
(1933 p. 102). Yet the lamp that Kezia accepts from her
grandmother with all solemnity in Trelude,' as she makes her
first entrance into her new home, is not deemed too big for the
litde girl to hold, even as it takes shape as a 'bright breathing
thing' (p. 17). With it in her hands, Kezia's powers of perception
change and, yet again, she proves herself her mother's daughter,
for the parrots on the wallpaper seem to come to life and fly past
her, just as the poppies on her mother's bedroom wallpaper later
come alive for her. So, while the 'litde lamp' of 'The Doll's
House' has its immediate source in the 'doll's lamp,' and is to
that extent relatively transparent as a symbol, it derives much of
its hidden power from three widely disparate sets of associations
identified here: Mansfield's fondly remembered schooldays at
Queen's College in London from 1903 to 1906, her indiscreet
journey of 1915 to France, and romanticized recollections of her
childhood home in New Zealand. There may even be another
strand in the conceptual history of the lamp. In August 1914, Sir
Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, solemnly announced
that 'the lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see
them lit again in our lifetime'. The very range of these
associations allowed Mansfield to blend the 'discreet' lamp in a
French pension with the lamp that symbolized the domestic
tranquility of her family home. On another plane, this strategy
allowed Mansfield to substitute for the memory of a soldier-lover
in February 1915 the far more poignant memory of a soldier
brother who had been killed on 7 October 1915, so that the light
of the 'litde lamp' would serve to illumine the darkness of his
death in her life. Between 1915 and 1921, then, the 'litde lamp,'
with its cluster of associations, had had time to mature into an
aesthetic object which, with its personal reverberations muted?
but not its emotional power?was embedded in and became the
centerpiece of a story that speaks and sees only through the eyes
of a sensitive litde girl in far-off New Zealand.
Here we must return to Mansfield's initial reference in her
journal entry of 1916?'A Recollection of Childhood'?to the
42
lamp in the actual doll's house, which was given to the family in
1890. Why, in her grief, would she have chosen, ostensibly in
memorializing her brother, to focus on an event that occurred in
1890-1, some three years before he had even been born? The
answer is surely that Leslie's recent death brought to mind not
just the birth of Mansfield's sister, Gwen, but her sudden and
disturbing death a few months later. Biographers and critics have
long been aware of a photograph showing baby Gwen in the
arms of her grandmother Dyer, with the original of the doll's
house behind them which was first reproduced and discussed in
the Mantz biography. Mary Burgan, however, makes the case
that 'Mansfield's [journal] narrative [. . .] is so indirect that none
of the biographers seem to have noticed that the infant [in the
photograph] is dead' (1994:3). That is, the grandmother is
actually holding a dead child on her lap. Since there is good
reason to accept this statement, 'The Doll's House' of 1921?a
direct descendant from 'A Recollection of Childhood' of 1916?
must be reinterpreted as a constituent part of Mansfield's 'long
elegy' for her brother, along with Prelude and 'At the Bay'. The
vase of white lilies and the 'funny little man with his head in a
black bag' in 'A Recollection of Childhood' are obvious internal
clues (Journal 1954:103) to what is happening. The idea of
photographing a dead baby and hanging the picture over the
fireplace, as described in this vignette, may now seem bizarre. In
fact, 'photography of dead infants was a memorial ritual in late
nineteenth century New Zealand,' as Burgan notes (Note 1,178)
and the practice was widespread in the United States too. John
Pultz makes the point explicitly: 'In order to have visual records
of dead children, parents paid photographers to photograph
their bodies in their homes; sometimes parents went so far as to
carry their child's body to a photographer's studio for a post
mortem portrait' (p. 33). He supports his statement with an 1850
daguerreotype of a dead child propped up in an armchair. Thus
the 'litde lamp' becomes more than the 'lamp of art' or the 'lamp
of knowledge'?it becomes the lamp of constancy that burns in
43
*J
*? ?r
*>
Mansfield's grandmother Mrs Dyer, with baby Gwen and the

doll's house
Alexander Turnbull Library F-49368-1/2
44
memory of the living spirit of her dead siblings: sister and

brother united in death. In Pater's terms, it becomes 'a sort of
material shrine or sanctuary of sentiment' (Buckler p. 226). This
reading is consistent with Susan Stewart's understanding of the
doll's house itself within the economy of the miniature, although
she makes no reference to?and is perhaps unaware of?
Mansfield's story: 'The dollhouse [. . . ] represents a particular
form of interiority, an interiority which the subject experiences
as its sanctuary (fantasy)' (p. 65). This notion of sanctuary,
generously interpreted, is crucial to the reading of Mansfield's
doll's house here.
In the construction of the original doll's house gifted to the
Beauchamp children, no detail had been spared to make it, in
miniature, as 'real' as possible?from real bedclothes to real glass
windows. Yet there is one relevant, albeit intriguingly anomalous,
feature of the story: the dolls, observes the narrator, 'were really
too big for the doll's house' and 'didn't look as though they
belonged' (p. 3). The motivation for these comments is by no
means clear and no adequate explanation within the framework
of the story itself seems possible. Dunbar notices this detail and
offers a tentative and not altogether convincing explanation (p.
174-75). For any sort of answer we must first address another
puzzling, and apparendy unrelated, fact. When Mansfield's Bliss
was about to appear in 1920, the publisher, Constable, needed a
photograph of the author for publicity purposes. Since Mansfield
was in France at the time, Murry submitted a studio photograph
which he 'particularly treasured', taken in 1913 by Warren
Studios in the Strand, and then informed Mansfield of his
choice. She was furious, complaining bitterly to him, in a
telegram and a letter of 14 November 1920, that she had never
liked this 'hideous old photograph' and that 'It's not me. It's a
HORROR' (CL IV: 110). Years later, Murry confessed that 'even
now I find the violence of Katherine's reaction almost
incomprehensible' (1951:595). He never knew that he had
unwittingly selected what was probably the very photograph
45
Katherine Mansfield, 1914

Alexander Turnbull Library F-l7274-1/4
46
Mansfield had once given Careo. (Cf. Alpers 1980: 174. In a

private communication, Vincent O'Sullivan has said Alpers told
him he believed the photograph was the one reproduced here.)
This photograph was the basis for a watercolour miniature,
formerly the property of Mansfield's sister, Mrs Mackintosh Bell,
but now at the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. If this is
the 'miniature portrait' commissioned by Mansfield's father,
Mansfield must have sent him the photograph (see Scott, 1973).
Thus Mansfield's full and vehement repudiation of the
photograph could only have been a relatively recent
development not communicated to her husband. What Murry
also failed to remember was that she had been teased as a child
for being 'plump' and at fifteen weighed a very solid one
hundred and forty-three pounds (she was only five foot four and
a half inches tall, according to her passport). By 1918 she was
down to one hundred and eighteen pounds and notably lighter
still by 1920. Tuberculosis had dramatically changed her physical
appearance and made her altogether smaller and thinner. As she
wrote to her mother, Annie Beauchamp, on 18 January 1918: 'At
this rate I will be a midget tooth pick at fifty' (CL II: 17). So the
constituent elements of a distinct pathology begin to take shape:
her hated youthful plumpness; her fear of large or swelling
things; the links between food and sex so apparent in her early
stories; and her preoccupation, like that of Keats, one of her
heroes, with 'easeful death,' to the point of contemplating suicide
after her brother's death. The problem with the 'hideous'
photograph was not then, as Mansfield disingenuously claimed,
that 'really I haven't got such beasdy eyes & long poodle hair & a
streaky fringe' (CL IV: 110) but that it reminded her of a
despised former self, the very picture of good health, so remote
from the wraithlike figure she had become. Like Beryl Fairfield
in Prelude she needed to see her 'real self as 'faint and
insubstantial' (p. 67)?a status that her tuberculosis guaranteed.
No need for anorexia. By the time she wrote 'The Doll's House,'
then, she was fictively preparing a place for herself?a sanctuary
47
of sorts?just as she had for Leslie in Prelude, and she could not
afford to be 'really too big,' if she were to become the doll that
did belong in the doll's house. Her aesthetic of the miniature had
become entwined with an aesthetic of death. And, as Michel de
Certeau reminds us, 'the death that cannot be said can be written
and find a language.'(1988: 195).
There is abundant evidence that Mansfield suffered from a
Peter Pan complex and would not grow up in a variety of ways.
"You and I don't live like grown up people, you know,' she wrote
to Murry on 22 March 1916 (CL I: 255) at a time when she was
twenty-seven and he was twenty-six. The sometimes childish
language of her letters to Murry?as in 'pigglejams' [pajamas],
'spegglechicks [spectacles], and 'raspbugs' [raspberries] (CL II:
76; III: 48 and 257)?is symptomatic, as is her obsession with
her Japanese dolls, O Har? San and Ribni, whom she spoke of,
and treated, somewhat jokingly, as though they were alive.
Incidentally, the name O Har? San must be a mis-recollection of
O Hana San ('Miss Flower'), the tide of a poem in Yone
Noguchi's From The Eastern Sea. (1903); Ribni , a male doll, was
named after the Captain Ribnikov in Alexander Kuprin's The
River of Ufe (1916). In her 1915 Christmas Day letter to Murry
from Bandol, for example, Mansfield observes parenthetically
that:
We are still quite babies enough to play with dolls and

I'd much rather pretend about [O] Hara [San] than about
a real person. I would so see her, with her little hands in
her kimono sleeves, very pale & wanting her hair
brushed'(CL I: 232).
Exotic O Hara San had been sent back to England with Murry at
the beginning of December 1915, presumably as a kind of
simulacrum for her exotic mistress. The note by O'Sullivan and
Scott that the doll was 'lent to Murry as a mascot' (CL I: 206)
treats the event rather more matter-of-facdy. Mansfield's
response to the news that the doll's head had come off during
48
the journey home, confirms a degree of identification with the

doll: 'What a minx to take off her head like that?but you ought
to have known, Bogey. You are always accusing me of the same
thing' (CL I: 205). She occasionally?and revealingly?refers to
herself as a doll too, as in her letter to Murry of 22 December
1917: 'I feel quite different [. . .] rather like a doll that has been
mended but put on a high shelf to dry before it can be played
with again' (CL I: 356) and, in a letter of 20 January 1920, she
describes one of her temporary homes in Italy to Lady Ottoline
Morrell as 'a pretty litde house?pretty like a doll's house with a
garden & terrace' (CL III: 183). Her old friend, Sylvia Lynd,
actually characterizes Mansfield as 'not unlike one of those litde
dolls that, in Japan's less commercial days, were among the most
precious and transparent treasures of one's toy cupboard' (cited
in Morris 1938:27). Virginia Woolf offers surprisingly pertinent
testimony too. A week after Mansfield's death, in her diary for
Tuesday 16 January 1923, Woolf recalled visiting her at 2
Pordand Villas?it would have been some time between May
andjulyl2 1919:
everything was very tidy, bright, & somehow like a
doll's house [ . . . ] She (it was summer) half lay on the
sofa by the window. She had her look of a Japanese doll,
with the fringe combed quite straight across her
forehead'. (II: 226).
Finally, a few years later, Conrad Aiken memorialized Mansfield,

thinly disguised as Reine Wilson, in Tour Obituary, Well
Written,' a frankly adulatory story in Costumes By Eros (1929) that
pays tribute to 'her burning intensity of spirit, the sheer naked
honesty with which she felt things.' Like Lynd and Woolf, he is
struck by her doll-like appearance: 'her brown eyes, under a
straight bang of black hair, were round as a doll's, and as
intense;' and he finds himself captivated by 'the doll-like
seriousness of face and doll-like eyes' (p. 19).
49
I began by identifying the characteristic way in which

Mansfield gave life to objects by projecting herself into them, by
fetishizing them. Now it is possible to reread 'The Doll's House'
with that practice in mind and to understand its importance to
Mansfield as she was forced to contemplate her own death.
Jonathan Trout spoke for his creator too when he fulminated
against 'the shortness of life!' in 'At The Bay.' I have already
argued that for Mansfield the litde lamp served, among other
functions, to memorialize her sister, Gwen, and her brother,
Leslie?symbolism not so different from lighting a candle for
someone in the Catholic Church that Mansfield once nearly
joined under the influence of her 'Catholic cousins', Connie
Beauchamp and Jinnie Fullerton. Now I want to take the
argument one step further. Mansfield's highly developed
aesthetic sense was reflected in myriad ways: in her response to
what Virginia Woolf called 'solid objects', in the colours in which
she dressed, even in the way she organized her environment. At
times she quite self-consciously worked for an aesthetic effect in
which she became an integral part, indeed the centrepiece, of a
sort of tableau vivant. In his autobiographical novel, The Last
Romantic (1937), William Orton, one of her former intimates,
vividly recalled a visit to her rooms in Cheyne Place around
1911:
She had made the place look quite beautiful?a couple

of candles stuck in a skull, another between the high
windows, a lamp on the floor shining through yellow
chrysanthemums, and herself accurately in the centre, in
a patterned pink kimono and white flowered frock, the
one cluster of primary brightness in the room (p. 270).
In its sense of the dramatic, of a staged event, this early scene

bears a family resemblance to that recorded by Virginia Woolf so
many years later, even to the common Japanese touches. There
is, of course, much to be said about Mansfield's love affair with
things Japanese, apparendy a by-product of her enthusiasm for
50
Wilde and Whisder. We know, for example, that she visited the
Japanese-British exhibition at Shepherd's Bush in 1910; and her
distinctive hair-style, her Japanese dolls, her fondness for
kimonos, and for Yone Noguchi's poetry?even perhaps her
aesthetic of the miniature embodied in such artifacts as bonsai
and netsuke?are all manifestations of this love affair. It would be
perfecdy consistent with the kind of self-consciousness so vividly
recaptured by Orton that, in 'The Doll's House,' one of her last
major stories (the sub-text of another, 'The Fly,' is also the death
of a relative in the war), Mansfield would conceive of a fictional
final resting place beside her siblings, 'herself accurately in the
centre.' By projecting herself into the lamp, safely miniaturized,
she could become both a sort of auto-icon?her own aesthetic
object?and, once again, the child in the house.
Postscript
In October 1922, aware of her impending death, Mansfield had

retreated for spiritual renewal to Gurdjieffs Institute for the
Harmonious Development of Man, near Fontainebleau, where
she spent Christmas. Madame Ad?le Kafian, who helped care for
her, recalls lighting three candles on a Christmas tree?one for
each of them and one for Murry (Merlin 1950:186). When one of
the candles flickered briefly and went out, Mansfield's response
was in character and suggests how much she had come to
identify herself?true to Pater's vision?with the flame in the
lamp. 'C'est moi,' she whispered, perhaps unconsciously echoing
Flaubert's reputed gloss on his creation. In The Renaissance, Pater
had provided a kind of slogan for his generation with his
injunction to live intensely, to burn with 'a hard gemlike flame.'
From the time of her return to London in 1908, Mansfield seems
to have been listening. In her penultimate letter to Murry of 26
December 1922 she had written, almost desperately, 'If I were
allowed one single cry to God that cry would be: I want to be
real' This cri de coeur takes us back to the litde lamp in 'The Doll's
51
House' and now we can fully comprehend the hitherto puzzling

insistence that 'the lamp was real too.'
Works Cited
Aiken, Conrad, Costumes By Eros (London: Jonathan Cape, 1929)

Aldington, Richard, ed., D. H. Lawrence: Selected Utters, with an
introduction by Aldous Huxley (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,
1950)
Alpers, Antony, The Ufe of Katherine Mansfield, (New York: Viking Press,
1980)
Bell, Anne Olivier and Andrew McNeillie, The Diary of Virginia Woolf
Vol. II 1920-24 (London: Hogarth Press, 1978)
Braun, Sidney D, ed., Dictionary of French Uterature (Greenwich, CT:
Fawcett Publications, 1964)
Bullett, Gerald, 'The Short Story' in Modern English Fiction: A Personal
View (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1926) pp. 110-115.
Burgan, Mary, Illness, Gender, <& Writing. The Case of Katherine Mansfield
(Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994)
Buckler, William E., ed., Walter Pater. Three Major Texts (The Renaissance,
Appredations, and Imaginary Portraits), (New York and London: New
York University Press, 1986)
Careo, Francis, Montmartre ? Vingt Ans, (Paris: ?ditions Albin Michel,
1938)
De Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Ufe, Translated by Steven
Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)
Dunbar, Pamela, Radical Mansfield: Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield's
Short Stories (London: Macmillan, 1997)
Fullbrook, Kate, Katherine Mansfield, (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1986)
Hankin, C. A., Katherine Mansfield and Her Confessional Stories (New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1983)
Kafian, Ad?le, 'The Last Days of Katherine Mansfield', Adelphi,
October-December 1946, 36-39.
52
Kaplan, Sydney Janet, Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist

Fiction (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991)
Lenoel, Odette, La vocation de Katherine Mansfield (Paris: Editions Albin
Michel, 1946)
Mansfield, Katherine, Prelude (Richmond: Hogarth Press, [1918])
?. 'The Doll's House' in The Doves Nest <& Other Stories (London:
Constable, 1923)
Mantz, Ruth E. and J. Middleton Murry, The Ufe of Katherine Mansfield
(London: Constable, 1933)
Meisel, Perry, The Absent Father. Virginia Woof and Walter Pater (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980)
Merlin, Roland, U drame secret de Katherine Mansfield (Paris: Editions du
Seuil, 1950)
Morris, G. N., Railways Magayne, October 1, 1938, 25-29.
Murry, John Middleton, ed., Katherine Mansfield's Utters to John Middleton
Murry, 1913-1922 (London: Constable, 1951)
Murry, John Middleton, ed., Journal of Katherine Mansfield, Definitive
Edition (London: Constable, 1954)
Noguchi, Yone, From the Eastern Sea, (Tokyo: Fuzanbo and London:
The Unicorn Press, 1903)
Orton, William, The Last Romantic (Farrar and Rinehart Inc., 1937)
O'Sullivan, Vincent, The Magnetic Chain: Notes and Approaches to K.
M', Landfall,]une 1975, vol. 29, no. 2, 114:95-131. Reprinted in Pilditch
129-153.
?. ed., Poems of Katherine Mansfield (Auckland: Oxford University Press,
1988)
O'Sullivan, Vincent and Margaret Scott, eds., The Collected Utters of
Katherine Mansfield, 4 Vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984-1996)
Pater, Walter, Imaginary Portraits' in Miscellaneous Studies (London:
Macmillan, 1910)
Pilditch, Jan, The Critical Response to Katherine Mansfield (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1996)
Pultz, John, The Body and The Uns: Photography 1839 to the Present (New
York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995)
53
Scott, Margaret, "The Extant Manuscripts of Katherine Mansfield",

Etudes Anglaises, 26 (1973), 413-419.
?. ed., The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks 2 Vols (Canterbury, New
Zealand: Lincoln University Press, 1997)
Stewart, Susan, On Unging: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the
Souvenir, the Collection (Durham and London, Duke University Press,
1993)
Stone, Jean E., Katherine Mansfield: Publications in Australia, 1907-09
(Sydney: Wentworth Books, 1977)
Tomalin, Claire, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Ufe (London: Viking
Penguin, 1987)
Willis, J. H., Jr. Uonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press,
1917A1 (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia,
1992)
54

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Victoria University of Wellington

Journal of New Zealand Literature

Katherine Mansfield and the Aesthetic Object

Victoria University of Wellington, Journal of New Zealand Literature are collaborating

Filtered through the prism of material culture studies, the

What can one do, faced with this wonderful tumble of

apple stalls, I cannot help stopping and staring until I

Much the same process of sympathetic identification occurs with

'Things had a habit of coming alive like that. Not only

[. . .] How often the medicine bottles had turned into a

Linda's affliction is, it seems, the very superfluity of her

of paralysis. Yet Mansfield seems determined to identify in Linda

In Trelude,' for example, it is Kezia who rescues a litde pill-box

journal provide the requisite documentary evidence of her

sense of beauty is dependent on any choiceness or special

We spent a queer night. The room?the room. The litde

In this account of the four-day tryst, the litde lamp is crucial to

one of her letters to Murry we know that she was wearing it on 4

Mansfield's grandmother Mrs Dyer, with baby Gwen and the

memory of the living spirit of her dead siblings: sister and

Katherine Mansfield, 1914

Mansfield had once given Careo. (Cf. Alpers 1980: 174. In a

We are still quite babies enough to play with dolls and

the journey home, confirms a degree of identification with the

Finally, a few years later, Conrad Aiken memorialized Mansfield,

I began by identifying the characteristic way in which

She had made the place look quite beautiful?a couple

In its sense of the dramatic, of a staged event, this early scene

In October 1922, aware of her impending death, Mansfield had

House' and now we can fully comprehend the hitherto puzzling

Aiken, Conrad, Costumes By Eros (London: Jonathan Cape, 1929)

Kaplan, Sydney Janet, Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist

Scott, Margaret, "The Extant Manuscripts of Katherine Mansfield",

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