Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous frontmatter
- Frontispiece
- Introduction
- CRITICISM
- Interior Matters: Secrecy and Hunger in Katherine Mansfield's ‘Bliss’
- Katherine Mansfield and Vitalist Psychology
- A Raft in the Sea of Loneliness: Katherine Mansfield's Discovery of Cosmic Anatomy
- Mansfield's Psychology of the Emotions
- Feeling ‘Like a Work-girl’: Class, Intimacy and Alienation in ‘The Garden Party’
- Me or I? The Search for the Self in the Early Writings of Katherine Mansfield
- ‘Jigging away into nothingness’: Knowledge, Language and Feminine Jouissance in ‘Bliss’ and ‘Psychology’
- ‘For the life of him he could not remember’: Post-war Memory, Mourning and Masculinity Crisis in Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Fly’
- CREATIVE WRITING
- CRITICAL MISCELLANY
- REVIEW ESSAY
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
- Join the Katherine Mansfield Society
‘For the life of him he could not remember’: Post-war Memory, Mourning and Masculinity Crisis in Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Fly’
from CRITICISM
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 May 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous frontmatter
- Frontispiece
- Introduction
- CRITICISM
- Interior Matters: Secrecy and Hunger in Katherine Mansfield's ‘Bliss’
- Katherine Mansfield and Vitalist Psychology
- A Raft in the Sea of Loneliness: Katherine Mansfield's Discovery of Cosmic Anatomy
- Mansfield's Psychology of the Emotions
- Feeling ‘Like a Work-girl’: Class, Intimacy and Alienation in ‘The Garden Party’
- Me or I? The Search for the Self in the Early Writings of Katherine Mansfield
- ‘Jigging away into nothingness’: Knowledge, Language and Feminine Jouissance in ‘Bliss’ and ‘Psychology’
- ‘For the life of him he could not remember’: Post-war Memory, Mourning and Masculinity Crisis in Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Fly’
- CREATIVE WRITING
- CRITICAL MISCELLANY
- REVIEW ESSAY
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
- Join the Katherine Mansfield Society
Summary
The First World War had an understandable and immediate impact on the lives and works of all contemporary European writers, but Katherine Mansfield's experiences during the war were perhaps more personal and dramatic than those of most of her peers. Having lost her brother, Leslie, who died in a grenade explosion in the war, and having had a stormy love affair in February 1915 with Francis Carco – a French poet and soldier – while illegally travelling to the occupied zone at Grey, Mansfield's existential experiences of loss emerging out of the war throw significant light on the craft and content of her short fiction. Her experience of trauma at the heart of a city is evinced in many accounts. In a letter written to John Middleton Murry on 2 April 1918 from Paris, Mansfield described the visual and auditory effect of gunfire in the street and the grotesque spectacle that followed:
Gunfire last evening – and at 3:15 this morning one woke to hear the air screaming. That is the effect of these sirens; they have a most diabolical sound. I dressed and went down to the cave… I got up again and went to look. Very ugly, very horrible. The whole top of a house as it were bitten out – all the windows broken, and the road of course covered with ruin.
The description underlines the increasing internalisation of trauma and nervous anxiety at the heart of a wartime city. As Mary Burgan argues in an analysis of Mansfield's literary representation of war à propos her personal loss and existential mourning, the wartime horrors ‘actually enabled her to rework the past out of fragments of memory, dreams, and an eventual understanding of the origins of her destabilizing anxieties’. Such modes of representation, with their liminality and psychological intensity, were perhaps best suited to the formal quality of the short story, which can crystallise memory and embodied experiences in episodic and epiphanic narrative frames.
Written in February 1922 during a sojourn at the Victoria Palace hotel in Paris, where Mansfield had gone for X-ray treatment with Dr Ivan Manoukhin, ‘The Fly’ is widely regarded as one of the most psychological representations of repression and loss in First World War fiction, and as a story which also approximates Mansfield's own complex relationship with her father and her response to her brother's death in the war.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Katherine Mansfield and Psychology , pp. 113 - 124Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016