Mansfield's (Post)colonial-Modernism

Mansfield's dualistic positioning, which crosses international modernism with (post)colonial critique, stems from her habitation of multiple, layered states of being, magniied by her various allegiances to, and estrangements from, her New Zealand white settler and English migrant identities. This pluralism enables her great New Zealand stories like ‘At the Bay’, ‘The Garden Party’, and ‘The Dolls' House’, as well as the last stories written from late 1921 to July 1922 (the date of her final story ‘The Canary’), to be located within a (post)colonial-modernist framework. Mansfield represents various images of childhood from her bifurcated positioning through a world view dominated by death and mortality, and a consciousness that goes beyond the invocations of savagery and the spirit of the place in early stories and sketches of New Zealand: for example, ‘Old Tar’, in which hauntings by the dispossessed ‘other’ create atmospheric destabilisation and undermine the settler's ostensible ownership of land; ‘In the Botanical Gardens’, where a hostile emanation in the native bush implies the sense of guilt at white settler intrusion; or in ‘The Woman at the Store’ where the savage spirit of the land roams unchecked at sundown. The white settler point of view is undermined in an aesthetics of narrative fracture in these earlier stories – ellipses, omissions, paradox – whereby ghostly emanations from the past and phantasmagoric presences are constituent of the divided and ruptured condition of colonialism.