Speaker
Description
Katherine Mansfield’s fiction and personal writings abound in marine life forms: ‘decorative starfish’, ‘velvet sea anemones’, ‘pink tinted sea shells’ – these are just a few of the animals that inhabit her fictional waters. She describes her short story, ‘At the Bay’ (1922) as a kind of literary rock pool, ‘full of sand and seaweed, […] and the tide coming in’ – images based on her own childhood memories. In Mansfield’s oeuvre, the coastal pool and its inhabitants become charged with aesthetic and affective energies, which allows her child characters to reimagine and redraw scientific, social, physical and emotional boundaries between humans and their environment. Through her depiction of children’s engagement with rock pool animals in ‘At the Bay’, Mansfield questions late nineteenth-century biological and psychological theories, which drew a parallel between marine invertebrates’ and children’s mental development, arguing that both groups possess a rudimentary form of the adult human mind, which allows them to know and interact with their surroundings in a simplistic and immature way. In contrast with scientific ideas of progressive development, in Mansfield’s modernist writing, images of marine animals resurface in relation with her thinking about alternative, non-linear ways of understanding the world and forging intimate bonds with others. Through her engagement with aquatic life forms, Mansfield embraces a distinctly childlike, non-rational and non-teleological mode of creating aesthetic and affective connections.
| Principal domain of study | English literary studies |
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