Bridging the Gulf, Taking the Risk: an Exploration of "Relationships" in Katherine Mansfield's 'Juliet', 'Brave Love', and 'Prelude'

The introduction of this thesis examines Katherine Mansfield’s belief that elements of a fictional work should be “related”. Passages in her literary reviews, journals, and letters state or imply her conviction that such related elements demonstrate the thinking, exploring author’s control of the text and express the author’s ideas and vision. The introduction also suggests that Mansfield’s actual “relationship” methods (as shown in the examined texts) are typical of modernist practice. The thesis then explores such methods in three of Mansfield’s earlier episodic fictions: ‘Juliet’ (written 1906–1907), ‘Brave Love’ (completed early 1915); and ‘Prelude’ (written 1915 to 1917). Chapter one introduces the “relationship” methods by a reading of the 1907 vignette ‘In the Botanical Gardens’; it then explores the techniques used in ‘Juliet’ and ‘Brave Love’, finding some similarity in the approaches. Chapter two is a section-by-section reading of ‘Prelude’, based on developments of some techniques established in chapter one. The thesis’s primary focus on each work’s ways of relating textual elements continues an approach begun by the New Critics but without their tendency to single out a main character, central symbol, and fixed meaning. Here, the argument recognises critical discussions highlighting the binary and the fluid in Mansfield’s works and the works’ alignment with both expressionism and impressionism. The resulting readings of the three works demonstrate Mansfield’s increasingly skilful techniques of “bridging the gulf” between disparate aspects of experience to achieve the modernist aim of variety and unity. The texts set up standard oppositions (such as conventionality/unconventionality, naivety/cynicism, master/servant, adult/child) and subvert them ironically. Characters on either side are associated with symbols and myths of vulnerability and power to depict how those characters both exercise and are shaped by forces, which may be social, biological, creative, or others more mysterious. These three stories of Mansfield’s adolescence and early adulthood implicitly question (given the pervasiveness of such forces) whether free choice and clear vision are possible, which potentials of identity can be realised, and what is the nature of existence itself. These readings demonstrate the achievement of Mansfield’s own requirements that fiction should be exploratory: the texts appear in the last resort to be philosophical in intent, “adventures of the soul”.