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
A Raft in the Sea of Loneliness: Katherine Mansfield's Discovery of Cosmic Anatomy
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
21.V.18. I positively feel, in my hideous modern way, that I cant get into touch with my mind. I am standing gasping in one of those disgusting telephone boxes and I cant ‘get through’. ‘Sorry. There's no reply’ tinkles out the little voice. ‘Will you ring them again, exchange? A good long ring. There must be somebody there.’ ‘I cant get any answer’.
Katherine Mansfield had a recurrent fear of loneliness: not only external loneliness, being cut off from other human beings and nature at large, but also inner loneliness, being cut off from herself, from that innermost dimension that she strove to reach with all her strength. The opposite of loneliness is relatedness, which is what her discovery of M. B. Oxon's Cosmic Anatomy and the Structure of the Ego (1921) helped her achieve, according to the vibrant words she wrote on 4 January 1922:
I have read a good deal of Cosmic Anatomy – understood it far better. Yes, such a book does fascinate me. Why does Jack hate it so? To get even a glimpse of the relation of things, to follow that relation & find it remains true through the ages enlarges my little mind as nothing else does. Its only a greater view of psychology. (N2 313)
This cryptic passage is an apt description for a book that remains no less cryptic despite almost a century of Mansfield criticism. Although Cosmic Anatomy is at the core of the Mansfield myth, few scholars have attempted either to contextualize it within the cultural scenario that saw the development of modernism or to scrutinize it more closely.
In order to understand Mansfield's response to this book we need to take into account a complex network of interpersonal exchanges that spans the divide between the intellectual and the emotional, science and pseudoscience, rationality and its ‘others’. It was Mansfield's old friend and mentor, A. R. Orage – a socialist thinker who had developed an interest in theosophy, and who edited the New Age between 1907 and 1922 – who sent the recently published Cosmic Anatomy to J. M. Murry, hoping to have it reviewed, but Murry ‘intensely disliked this “book of occult doctrines”’ and it was Mansfield who started reading it.
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- Information
- Katherine Mansfield and Psychology , pp. 38 - 55Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016