Dangerous Garden: Katherine Mansfield’s New Zealand Stories: ‘Prelude’, ‘At the Bay’, and ‘The Doll’s House’
“[T]here’s this vast dangerous garden, waiting out there, undiscovered, unexplored” a character in Mansfield’s ‘At the Bay’ longingly declares, lamenting “The shortness of life!” Having lost her brother to World War One, New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield herself led a tragically brief life, dying of tuberculosis aged just thirty-four, a century ago last year. Mansfield travelled to Europe aged nineteen, and prevented by her illness from returning home, evoked the New Zealand of her youth in her writing.
My
favourite Mansfield stories are those featuring the Burnell family: ‘Prelude,
‘At the Bay’ and ‘The Doll’s House’. As a Modernist, Mansfield prioritises a
person’s inner life. Through the perspective of Kezia, a child who effectively
represents the young Katherine, she recreates childhood innocence and the
newness of a child’s experience, especially its sensory nature. However, she
also recognises how new discoveries can make childhood disturbing and
disruptive. These developments correspond, in her writing, with natural
phenomena summoned up in childlike poetic rhythms. Dawn
is described like a child’s painting: ‘sharp and chill with red clouds on a
faint green sky’ where ‘sounded the sleepy sea’. But Mansfield is not
idealistic. Her stories express a
yearning for innocence in response to the crisis of conflict yet also gesture
towards war’s looming shadow. As they learn about life, her children encounter
death, and all react differently when they witness it.
Adulthood,
for Mansfield, isn’t necessarily something to aspire to. The Burnell children’s
role-playing games satirise adult social mores: “I hate playing ladies […] you
always make us go to church hand in hand and come home and go to bed” and “I
don’t think you ought to introduce me to the servant’ […] ‘Well, she’s more of
a lady-help…and you do introduce lady-helps, I know, because Mrs Samuel Josephs
had one”. Meanwhile, a simple act of kindness by Kezia subverts adult snobbery forbidding
the children to associate with two poor little sisters.
Mansfield’s
adults don’t seem so different from children. Kezia’s childishly competitive father
delights in having ‘beaten them all again’. Her unmarried aunt Beryl indulges
her imagination much as a child would, picturing ‘a young man’ presenting her
with ‘a big bouquet’. As Kezia is fearful of ‘IT [being] behind her’, her
mother fears that ‘THEY [are] there’ and ‘THEY kn[o]w how frightened she [is]’.
Many of Mansfield’s grown-up characters long to break free from the mundaneness
of adult existence and parenthood’s heavy responsibilities, yet never manage to
do so. Kezia’s mother, feeling ‘seized and shaken’ by ‘Life’, wonders ‘[Is]
there no escape?’
Reflecting
the changes generated by World War One, Mansfield’s poetic prose represents
childhood as a transitional state, both progressive and regressive; innocent,
yet animalistic; fearful, yet enchanted. Equally, she captures adult
frustrations alongside the urge to seize and celebrate an existence which is
fleeting and, as children realise, full of fear and wonder.
Mansfield’s
garden is no Eden; but then again, perhaps it is, since it is a place of both
beauty and peril. Highlighting adult desires to regress to childhood and
ironically critiquing regressive aspects of adult life, Mansfield
simultaneously mourns the loss of and celebrates innocence, acknowledging,
above all, the compulsion to evolve.
If this has whetted your appetite, Penguin’s Wild Places is a new collection of Mansfield’s stories. I also found a particularly evocative reading of ‘At the Bay’ on YouTube:
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