Katherine Mansfield And Virginia Woolf

Reconsiders of Arendt's philosophy of natality in terms of biopolitical theory and feminism to defend women's reproductive choices

Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf were bound together by a tie alternately characterised as a «curious friendship» and an «uneasy sisterhood». Relying on feminist and poststructural critiques of thinking about writing and writers in terms of autonomous creative subjects, the book reconsiders the relationship between these writers from the biographical and the literary points of view. Their respective self-created models show the multiplicity within the paradigm of the «New Woman», and correspond with their divergent but complementary female modernisms. Mansfield's thematic femininity and Woolf's feminine textuality are integrated into contemporary feminist theory and women writers' creative practice: like Mansfield, they utter previously unutterable experiences but in a language that flows like Woolf's sentences.

Long after the death of Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) described being haunted by Mansfield in dreams. Through detailed comparative readings of their fiction, letters, and diaries, Smith explores the intense affinity between the two writers. Their particular inflection of modernism is interpreted through their shared experience as `threshold people', familiar with the liminal, for each of them a zone of transition and habitation. Writing at a time when the First World War and changing attitudes to empire problematized boundaries and definitions of foreignness, we see how the fiction of both Mansfield and Woolf is characterized by moments of disorienting suspension in which the perceiving consciousness sees the familiar made strange, the domestic made menacing.

In a letter, Katherine Mansfield wrote: "I hate the sort of license that English people give themselves--to spread over and flop and roll about. I feel as fastidious as though I write with acid." This book explores Mansfield's idiosyncratic aesthetic by focusing on her position as an outsider in Britain: a New-Zealander, a woman writer, a Fauvist, and eventually a consumptive. Her sharp-edged fiction is discussed in relation to her involvement with Post-Impressionist painting and painters.

Word of Mouth focuses on the two most prominent women in British modernism, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. Both wrote with an extraordinary and sometimes celebratory self-consciousness about their status as "women writers". At odds with their explicit privileging of female difference, however, are patterns of imagery that demonstrate self-revulsion and self-hatred, the woman writer's rejection of herself. Patricia Moran points out that strategies of resistance and challenge are also strategies of repudiation and revulsion directed at female embodiment. Word of Mouth reevaluates Mansfield and Woolf, focusing on the figures of the anorexic and the hysteric and on the extensive imagery of eating, feeding, starvation, suffocation, flesh, and longing that permeates both fictional and nonfictional texts; it locates this writing within the overlapping frames of psychoanalytic theory, studies of women and eating disorders, and feminist work on women's anxiety of authorship.

Taking on the neglected issue of the short story's relationship to literary Modernism, Claire Drewery examines works by Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, and Virginia Woolf. Drewery argues that the short story as a genre is preoccupied with transgressing boundaries, and thus offers an ideal platform from which to examine the Modernist fascination with the liminal. Embodying both liberation and restriction, liminal spaces on the one hand enable challenges to traditional cultural and personal identities, while on the other hand they entail the inevitable negative consequences of occupying the position of the outsider: marginality, psychosis, and death. Mansfield, Richardson, Sinclair, and Woolf all exploit this paradox in their short fiction, which typically explores literal and psychological borderline states that are resistant to rational analysis. Thus, their short stories offered these authors an opportunity to represent the borders of unconsciousness and to articulate meaning while also conveying a sense of that which is unsayable. Through their concern with liminality, Drewery shows, these writers contribute significantly to the Modernist aesthetic that interrogates identity, the construction of the self, and the relationship between the individual and society.