Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism

• Published in: The D. H. Lawrence review 2013, Vol.38 (2), p.110-114
• Main Author: Brault-Dreux, Elise
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: British & Irish literature; English literature; Lawrence, D H (1885-1930); Mansfield, Katherine (1888-1923); THE BOOK REVIEWS
• ISSN: 0011-4936

According to Gerardo Rodriguez Salas and Isabel Maria Andrés Cuevas, it is this sense of threat, coupled with a shared contempt for "patriarchal tyranny," which led both Mansfield and Virginia Woolf to make use of the grotesque, the camivalesque and animalization in their depictions of femininity and maternity. Reid also draws our attention to the "androgynous impulses" common to both authors, pointing out the threatening aspect of androgyny for male characters (using the example of Mellors) who desire to "evacuate the body, to become pure spirit and thereby to transcend gender." [...]Reid argues, for Mansfield as for Lawrence, the body is not to be apprehended too quickly: it is a "fraught notion." Through a parallel reading of a selection of both authors' short stories-Lawrence's "Daughters of the Vicar," "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter" and "Odour of Chrysanthemums," and Mansfield's "The Daughters of the Later Colonel," ''A Married Man's Story" and 'At the Bay"-Reid shows that in Lawrence the individual is able to recognize otherness while Mansfield's characters generally cannot do so because they remain isolated. Without overvaluing her oeuvre, the collection very successfully reconsiders Mansfield's style and production as distinctly modernist. [...]Lawrence scholars will find much of interest here even beyond the Reid essay.