Lyric Compression in the Stories

This paper begins by stressing the need f'or a more critical approach to the work of Katherine Mansfield, accounts of which tend often to rely on purely biographical material. After discussing the relative failure of In a Germán Pensión, which is attributed to a want of focus in the narrative point of view, the essay goes on to suggest that, in the iater work, the twin techniques of highlighting and epiphany (the privileging of certain lyrical hioments of symbolic visión) enable Katherine Mansfield to construct more satisfaetory narratives in which judgemenls are implied rather than stated. Without denying the importance of Mansfield's personal experiences as source material, or the relatively well-documented influence of Chekhov, the paper stresses the importance in her development of early-century literary theory and practice, especially the current of Modernism as it affected the lyric in particular. It is suggested that this helps to account f'or the poetic nature of Katherine Mansfield's most characteristic work. Though Katherine Mansfield's short life was not notably wilder or more obviously exemplary than the lives of most of her literary eontemporaries, the closest studies of her work are still critical biographies (Berkman 1951; Alpers 1956; Meyers 1978). In such studies her doings, sexual and otherwise, have (inevitably?) upstaged the impeccably subdued performances of the writer. A number of explanations for this state of affairs suggest themselves. In the first place, the craving for stability that is a strong element in so many of the stories, and the characteristic positioning of her authorial narrators as half-envious witnesses of happier or less fraught lives, may seem to bespeak a native sense of isolation or exclusión of a sort that biography might chart more readily than criticism tout court. Secondly, gossip and rumour of a more or less malieious kind were the life-b'iood of the D.H.Lawrence circle with which Katherine Mansfield and her second husband, John Middleton Murry, were partly associated. Murry's understandable desire to choke these stories, and his somewhat pathetic attempts to smooth out in retrospect the kinks in the historical record, merely encouraged suspicions that there were sustaining morseís here for the literary journalist and for the scandalmonger. Thirdly, and most obviously, the