Introduction: ‘Vignette: I Look Out Through the Window’

The apparently dreary and clichéd nature of the song that Beryl sings in the quotation above is illusory; it is a text that, for Katherine Mansfield, has a disguised but defined personal association, that is, to a specific Russian folk song arranged for guitar and voice. Mansfield was an amateur guitarist and an aspiring vocalist so that the inclusion of this reference in ‘Prelude’ gives it even more potency for any biographer of Mansfield or scholars examining that story. The specificity of musical reference in the scene is prefigured several times in Mansfield's oeuvre, including ‘The Story of Pearl Button’ (1907), a piece about the humiliation of Pearl's first day at school. In this text, the class sing-along ditty ‘To the Woods’ – from the German folk song ‘Gruss Dem Walde’ – is interrupted by the movement of the swinging scythe so reminiscent of Mr Dyer's own ‘supplejack whipping’. There are multiple other examples in her fictional work for which the disguised precision of the musical reference fulfils Mansfield's desire to write something ‘a little sonoro’.

Although the term ‘vignette’ implies prose, Mansfield uses the word for both poetry and fiction. An example of the latter, ‘Vignette: I Look Out Through the Window’, which was written while the author's lover Garnet Trowell was on tour with the Moody Manners Opera Company, represents her acute sensitivity to the synaesthetic and symbolic potentials of music. Integral to the mood of the text is the presence of the window, ‘that most liminal of all spaces’, that represents the author's sense of aloneness and through which she sees the trees as frail human souls trembling with fear. Despite the rhododendron not flowering – it is winter after all – somehow the tree reaches to the sun, and to music, for comfort and protection. The evergreen plant, here representative of Mansfield herself, contains the promise of renewal and life and contrasts with the deciduous pines or ‘crucified trees’ which are barren of foliage and frightening.