A Curious Pain Somewhere

In one of Katherine Mansfield's early stories, ‘In Summer’ (1908), a young fairy child named Phyllis sits upon a hillside and sobs, ‘Oh, I have never been so unhappy before. […] I have a curious pain somewhere.’ It is an arresting and confusing moment. Phyllis, a child on the brink of adulthood, cannot name the unfamiliar and vaguely located pain. The nature of the pain is never clarified. It might be physical pain (for women's specific pains are often spoken of in oblique terms) or emotional pain, which plays out in the body but cannot be said to happen in any particular place. To read Mansfield is to reckon with such ambiguously embodied feelings – life for her characters is the experience of obtrusive and often unarticulated emotions. In her most memorable characters we observe emotion in the body: Ma Parker tries desperately to hold back her ‘proper cry’ (2: 297), Bertha Young has uncontrollable urges ‘to run instead of walk’ in her moments of bliss (2: 142), and the anxious Kezia tiptoes out of ‘Prelude’ feeling ‘hot all over’ (2: 92).

For Mansfield, manifest character emotion made literature valuable. In her letters, notebooks and published reviews, she often criticised modernist peers who, in her estimation, wasted their craftsmanship on characters with no apparent emotional life. Dorothy Richardson and Edith Wharton both received this charge from Mansfield, as did E. M. Forster, of whose Howards End she wrote, ‘And I can never be perfectly certain whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatal forgotten umbrella. All things considered, I think it must have been the umbrella.’ The long-suffering Bast, in Mansfield's opinion, is not present in Forster's novel as a human body with an emotional life and is therefore no better than an inanimate object. Mansfield's thoughts on Bast are particularly important in that they directly discuss his physical abilities (in this case, sexual potency) in order to suggest indirectly a lack of interiority. If Bast had any perceivable feeling, Mansfield believes, we could certainly imagine him making love and procreating.