Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- INTRODUCTION: Katherine Mansfield, War Writer
- CRITICISM
- ‘By what name are we to call death?’: The Case of ‘An Indiscreet Journey’
- Katherine Mansfield's War
- Mansfield's ‘Writing Game’ and World War One
- Ordinary Discordance: Katherine Mansfield and the First World War
- Katherine Mansfield's Home Front: Submerging the Martial Metaphors of ‘The Aloe’
- War Thoughts and Home: Katherine Mansfield's Model of a Hardened Heart in a Broken World
- Mythology and/of the Great War in Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’
- CREATIVE WRITING
- Poetry
- Short Story
- REPORTS
- Reviews
- Notes on Contributors
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
Katherine Mansfield's Home Front: Submerging the Martial Metaphors of ‘The Aloe’
from CRITICISM
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- INTRODUCTION: Katherine Mansfield, War Writer
- CRITICISM
- ‘By what name are we to call death?’: The Case of ‘An Indiscreet Journey’
- Katherine Mansfield's War
- Mansfield's ‘Writing Game’ and World War One
- Ordinary Discordance: Katherine Mansfield and the First World War
- Katherine Mansfield's Home Front: Submerging the Martial Metaphors of ‘The Aloe’
- War Thoughts and Home: Katherine Mansfield's Model of a Hardened Heart in a Broken World
- Mythology and/of the Great War in Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’
- CREATIVE WRITING
- Poetry
- Short Story
- REPORTS
- Reviews
- Notes on Contributors
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
Summary
In November 1919, Katherine Mansfield's critical review of Virginia Woolf's novel Night and Day was published under the title ‘A Ship Comes Into the Harbour’ in her husband John Middleton Murry's journal, the Athenaeum. Her private sentiments on the novel, expressed in letters to Murry in November of the same year, were equally negative. Well known to Mansfield scholars, these letters articulate a slightly different critique from that of the review. While her review concentrates on questions of form, specifically the very conventional novelistic structure Woolf had chosen for the novel, Mansfield's private reaction focuses upon another matter entirely: Woolf's evocation of an Edwardian setting that, to Mansfield, was tantamount to an evasion of the subject of the war altogether:
My private opinion is that it's a lie in the soul. The war never has been: that is what its message is. I don't want (G. forbid!) mobilization and the violation of Belgium, but the novel can't just leave the war out.
A defender of Woolf's novel might raise a legitimate objection to this charge. When living through a historical event as momentous as the First World War, is a past setting necessarily tantamount to an elision? And does Mansfield not leave herself open to precisely the same criticism? Mansfield never published a novel, but her longest story, ‘Prelude’ (1917), a distillation of an earlier draft entitled ‘The Aloe’, is similarly set in a historical past that predates the war. At first glance, ‘Prelude’ seems, like Night and Day, absolutely to ‘leave the war out’; however, examining the textual history of ‘Prelude’ reveals a quite different story. Unlike the work into which it would evolve, the original draft of ‘The Aloe’, primarily composed in Paris in early 1915, has a number of scenes in which echoes can be heard of the conflict that was raging less than a hundred miles away when Mansfield first wrote them. In this essay, I identify and analyse these moments in ‘The Aloe’, and link them both to Mansfield's experiences of the First World War in early 1915, and to her other writing of the period. Through the process of editing ‘Prelude’, I argue that the war moves from a metaphorical yet tangible presence in the text, to a seeming and signifying absence.
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- Katherine Mansfield and World War One , pp. 69 - 83Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2014