In Fire and Shadows: Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf
In Fire and Shadows
The Relationship Between Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf’s admission that
Katherine Mansfield’s writing was ‘the only writing [she] had ever been jealous
of’ opens the blurb of Mansfield’s posthumous short story collection.[1]
The two writers have been compared by scholars since their first published
works ‘burst upon the world in glory’ in the early 1920s, with Woolf’s name
appearing in most critical discussions of Mansfield’s short career.[2]
The friendship preserved in their letters and diaries was, in Woolf’s words,
‘founded on quicksands,’[3]
at times showing ‘malice and hostility,’ and at others ‘admiration and love.’[4]
The extensive similarities between the two women – as Angela Smith notes, their
‘abjection in illness, their bisexuality, their responses to childlessness, and
their complex gender relationships’ – created an ‘oddly complete understanding’
between the two, leading both to similarly innovative writing styles.[5]
Though, as Hermione Lee notes, they could not sustain their relationship because
Mansfield’s ‘colonialism and inherent uprootedness were the opposite of
Virginia’s ancestral network.’[6]
In this essay I examine their similar attempts to articulate inexpressible experiences
– particularly grief and the comprehension of being alive – in Mansfield’s
short stories and Jacob’s Room (1922), the novel which Woolf
wrote during the most intense period of their relationship.[7]
Both pursued the core ‘essence’ of reality in their writing, experiencing
ineffable, numinous ‘flashes’ of understanding in response to the untimely
deaths of their brothers.[8]
This exposes an understudied element of their intertextual relationship: the
ghosts which haunt both of their works.
The pervasive presence of death in both
Mansfield’s and Woolf’s lives informs their approach to writing. As Smith argues, their
‘precarious health’ placed the authors in similar ‘states of liminality.’[9]
Smith does not note the First World War or the untimely deaths of their
brothers as contributing factors to this liminal state, but their impact cannot
be overstated. Life and death constantly overlap in their narratives: in Jacob’s
Room, the sound of Archer’s voice ‘mixed life and death inextricably,’
and Woolf, while writing the novel, noted that she had ‘meant to write about
death, only life came breaking in as usual.’[10]
It is in response to the sight of a dead body that Laura in Mansfield’s ‘The
Garden Party’ half-sobs ‘‘Isn’t life,’ ‘Isn’t life-’ But what life was she
couldn’t explain.’[11]
In both instances, an attempt to comprehend death leads to a sudden and mysterious
comprehension of life. Cheryl Hindrichs notes that this is central to their
creative processes, as neither author ‘retreated from life’ in response to
tragedy, instead producing ‘more – and different art that faithfully captured
life,’ and its fragile nature.[12]
John Middleton Murry attributed Mansfield’s ‘creative breakthrough’ to the death
of her brother, Leslie – a claim critiqued by scholars like Andrew Bennett, but
one that nonetheless underscores the profound creative influence of loss on her
writing.[13] In
their private reflections, both women articulate their closeness to death
through metaphors of physical space: ‘How we play inside the house while Life
sits on the front doorstep and Death mounts guard at the back!’ Mansfield writes,
while Woolf describes life as ‘a strip of pavement over an abyss, [...]
unhappiness is everywhere, just beyond the door.’[14]
She reworks the image in Jacob’s Room, where ‘behind the door was the
obscene thing, the alarming presence’ which would induce ‘terror [...] as at
death’ (pp.113-4). Death lurks beyond the boundaries of the spaces in Woolf and
Mansfield’s narratives, reflecting the sense of precarity both experienced in
life.
Two forms of grief
underscore the works of both authors: the personal – the loss of their brothers
– and the public – the overwhelming grief of the First World War. As Murry
recalls, ‘no single one of Katherine’s friends who went to the war returned
alive from it.’[15] This was a topic of
contention between the two, however, as Mansfield decried Woolf’s novel Night
and Day (1919) for ‘a refusal to admit the war had happened.’[16]
Mansfield’s review of her ‘traditional’ novel would haunt Woolf throughout
their relationship, making her feel like ‘a decorous elderly dullard.[17]
This perhaps explains her desire for Mansfield to read Jacob’s Room,
which confronts the war’s surreal and senseless grief through its young
protagonist’s death: ‘what did he expect? Did he think he would come back?’ Jacob’s
friend Bonamy muses apathetically, reflecting the war’s staggering mortality
rate (p.176). In a letter she wrote to Mansfield, Woolf described how she was ‘always
chopping and changing,’ in the novel, shedding the ghost of the ‘elderly
dullard.’[18] Her
letter never received a reply, as Mansfield died of tuberculosis shortly
afterward, never to read Woolf’s response to her early review of Night and
Day.[19] Mansfield’s
own reckoning with the war is most clearly articulated in her short story ‘The
Fly’, where a photograph of a ‘grave-looking boy’ in a ‘spectral photographer’s
park’ becomes a synecdoche for the scores of young men who were killed in the
war, of whom Mansfield’s brother was one.[20]
Though alive in the image, the boy ‘looks’ toward his ‘grave,’ already ‘spectral’
in his existence, much like Woolf’s Jacob, who is described as ‘unconscious’
while alive and whose surname ‘Flanders’ contains a premonition of his death (p.28).
Despite their disagreement about each other’s portrayals of the war, both
authors ultimately depict national grief in strikingly similar ways. Their
young male characters exist as ‘living ghosts,’ embodying the war’s devastating inevitability – the certainty
that for countless young men, life was already overshadowed by death.
Mansfield’s brother, Leslie
Beauchamp, haunts her journal after his death in Belgium aged only twenty-one. She
reconstructs their final interaction, where he spoke with ‘absolute confidence
that [he’d] come back,’ it was ‘awfully mysterious.’[21]
Though physically absent, Leslie does ‘come back’ in Mansfield’s writing:
‘every time I take up my pen you are with me,’ she notes a year later.[22] Writing
becomes her refuge in grief, allowing her to momentarily resurrect him. ‘You
are more vividly with me, now this moment than if you were alive,’ she writes
to Leslie while drafting ‘Prelude’.[23]
The short story is a ‘debt of love,’ to their childhood in New Zealand – an attempt
to give shape to her inexpressible loss by transfiguring him into ‘the trees
and flowers, scents and light and shadow. [...] All must be told with an
afterglow, because you, my little sun of it, are set.’[24]
This act of omnipresent reincarnation explains the haunting presence in ‘Prelude’.
Though the story does not explicitly reference death, there is ‘something at
the back of Beryl’s mind, something she did not even put into words for herself.’[25]
Alice, the servant girl, reads aloud that ‘to dream of black beetles drawing a
hearse signifies death of one you hold near [...] either father, husband or
brother’ (SS, p.110). The spatial metaphor of death lurking ‘behind the
door’ also recurs when Kezia senses an unseen presence ‘just behind her,
waiting at the door, at the head of the stairs, at the bottom of the stairs,
hiding in the passage, ready to dart out the back door’ (SS, p.82). Though
he doesn’t connect this lurking presence with death, Bennett argues that this
‘strangeness’ in ‘Prelude’ ‘is not tied to the perception of any particular
person but floats free of characterological identification,’ making it
therefore its own entity in the narrative.[26]
Leslie’s abstract presence, with whom Mansfield ‘ranges [...] over all the
remembered places’ of her childhood, exists in the margins of the text, a
concealed figure, forever out of reach, as he is in Mansfield’s personal life.[27]
Death also lurks
beneath the surface of Jacob’s Room, where Woolf’s protagonist feels
‘something solid, immovable and grotesque at the back of it’ all (p.138).
Rather than the ghost of her brother, as in ‘Prelude’, this ‘something,’ for
Woolf is Jacob’s uneasy foreknowledge of his own death, as he is the
reconstruction of her brother. Thoby Stephen had contracted Typhoid on a family
holiday to Greece, dying aged only twenty-six. Like Mansfield, who revisits New
Zealand in her tribute to her brother, Woolf ‘retraces the Stephens’ holiday’ in
Jacob’s route through Europe.[28]
However, while Mansfield immediately documented her grief in her journal, Woolf
‘was not overcome by the blow,’ as Lee writes.[29]
In 1925 she recalled her initial denial of Thoby’s death, fabricating letters
to a family friend which documented progress in his recovery, until the
publication of Thoby’s obituary ended
the façade.[30]
This marked ‘the beginning of her keeping Thoby by turning him into fiction,’
Lee observes.[31]
Notable similarities been Thoby and Jacob cement the latter as a reconstruction
of her brother: Thoby had ‘far away eyes’ with a ‘sensibility about the
Greeks,’ and an ‘awkward’, ‘queer speechless way.’[32]
Jacob is, likewise, ‘extraordinarily awkward’, ‘absent-minded,’ and feels he is one of ‘the only people in the world who
know what the Greeks meant.’ (p.60, 138, 75). Woolf notes the fallacy
involved in reconstructing the dead in her later writing: ‘One of the
falsifications that one cannot guard against,’ she writes of her childhood with
Thoby, is the fact that the knowledge of his death ‘affects my memory of a time
when we had no ideas that our relationship was to end.’[33]
In her reconstruction of Thoby in Jacob’s Room, therefore, Woolf cannot
help but permeate his life with death, figuratively setting him in stone. Her
protagonist is ‘monolithic’, ‘like one of those statues… in the British
museum,’ forever fixed in time like Thoby (p.164, 79). She repeats the exact
description of his room at Cambridge from the middle of the novel – ‘the
eighteenth-century has its distinction’ – in the final scene after his death,
suggesting that the space is similarly timeless and liminal – unchanged whether
its inhabitant is dead or alive (p.69, 176). Unlike Mansfield, who expresses
her grief by reviving her brother as an ever-present, dynamic figure, Woolf renders Thoby as he exists in memory: imbued
with death, motionless and inaccessible.
Because grief is a
uniquely complex and inexpressible emotion, the writers articulate it by
‘gesturing towards what cannot be said because it is only subliminally known,’
as Smith writes.[34] Grief
necessitates new forms of articulation, like Mansfield’s abstraction of her
brother as the lurking figure in ‘Prelude’. Both authors use symbols to ‘gesture’
toward this inexpressible grief. For example, the ram’s skull that haunts Jacob’
throughout his life serves as a constant reminder of the blending of his youth
and impending death. It first appears when he plays on the beach as a child and
is later carved above his door at university, where his mother sorts through
his belongings (p.8, 176). Similarly, the titular insect in Mansfield’s ‘The
Fly’ is widely accepted by scholars to be a representation of the senseless
brutality of the war. As the Boss struggles to grieve his son, he derives a
strange satisfaction from drowning the fly.[35]
Both therefore use symbols to articulate the intricate complexities of grief. As
Smith notes, however, whilst both authors ‘invite the reader to speculate about
the luminous details in their fiction, their texts resist definitive readings.’[36] Replying
to Roger Fry’s query about To the Lighthouse Woolf explained that she
‘trusted that people would make [the lighthouse] the deposit for their own
emotions.’[37] The
two writers use their symbols to evoke complex, personal emotions,
acknowledging that the full understanding of life and death transcends
language.
Another device used
by both to articulate the complexities of life and death is their use of light
and shadow, evoking a chiaroscuro of human experience. Amidst the sea of intangible
observations, Woolf’s characters experience ‘a sudden vision’ that Jacob, ‘is
of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the most known to us,
[though] the moment after we know nothing about him’ (pp.70-1). This vision follows
Woolf’s description of human life as ‘a procession of shadows,’ only tangibly
experienced in the present moment. Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’ includes a strikingly
similar instance when Beryl, gazing into a mirror, sees ‘the real Beryl – a
shadow… a shadow. Faint and unsubstantial she shone. What was there of her
except the radiance? And for what tiny moments she was really she’ (SS, p.119).
Both authors’ sense of reality as fraught with death causes them to articulate
life as a ‘series of shadows’, from which only ‘tiny moments’ of concrete reality
emerge. Conversely, both liken the mind to a fleeting ‘flicker’ of light against
the shadows. Mansfield writes of a candle flame; ‘if I sit here long enough it
will shrink down and flicker and die. And so is life, [...] a vague,
transitory, fleeting thing.’[38] Woolf
similarly imagines Jacob’s Room having ‘everything as bright as fire in
the mist,’ believing that the role of the author is to ‘reveal the flickerings
of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain.’[39]
Mansfield recognised this ‘concealed light’ in Woolf, writing that she had seen
the ‘strange, trembling, glinting quality of her mind.’[40]
Both authors therefore use fire and light as
metaphors to capture the insubstantial nature of their lives – reality appears
in brief, transient ‘gleams’ from the surrounding shadows, creating a
chiaroscuro effect that reflects their constant awareness of death.
Rudolph Otto’s concept
of numinous experience offers another lens through which to examine the
authors’ articulation of life and death. Mansfield writes that ‘although Life
is loathsomely ugly [...] there is something at the back of it all - which if
only I were great enough to understand would make everything indescribably
beautiful. One just has glimpses, divine warnings – signs.’[41]
While Otto would attribute this ‘something’ to God, for Mansfield it is ‘Life’
itself, which ‘takes the place of [her] religion,’ and is capitalised throughout
her journal with quasi-biblical reverence.[42]
In numinous experiences, something ‘wholly other’ and ‘ineffable [...] holds
the mind,’ inducing ‘mystical awe.’[43]
Mansfield uses this language in the eulogy she writes for herself, describing ‘moments,
instants, gleams’ when she has felt ‘the possibilities of something quite other,’
– ‘one has these glimpses’ in which ‘the whole life of the soul is contained.’[44]
In one understudied journal entry, she describes ‘a curious complex emotion’
when viewing the stars, ‘they were shining steadily and ever more powerfully
into the very soul of my soul. [...] fear and ecstasy held me still –
shuddering.’[45]
Like a numinous experience, this comprehension of the stars ‘seizes upon [her]
with paralysing effect.’[46]
A similarly ineffable experience occurs in ‘Je ne parle pas Français’
when Dick is ‘simply overwhelmed. And the physical feeling was so curious, so
particular. [...] How can I describe it?’ (SS, p.145). To use Otto’s
terms, Dick’s experience is sui generis, or incomparably ‘of its own
kind,’ rendering it inexpressible.[47]
Numinous experience also occurs in Woolf’s personal writing, As Smith notes,
both authors ‘describe a moment of suspension which is a response to the
natural world’ in their diaries.[48]
Woolf writes that as a child she had an ‘unspoken
thought’ about her own ‘sense of life,’ a feeling she later reflects this in
her young characters: Fanny Elmer repeats
‘this is life,’ ‘this is life,’ without explanation in Jacob’s Room (p.170).[49] She
makes this elusive understanding the target of her fiction: ‘Whether we call it life or
spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing,’ is ‘the thing [writers]
seek,’ yet it ‘refuses to be contained’ in words.[50]
The shared pursuit of an elusive ‘essence’ is expressed by Mansfield, writing
to Woolf that ‘it is really very curious & thrilling that we should both,
quite apart from each other, be after so very nearly the same thing.’[51]
The authors’ numinous
articulation of the ‘essence’ of life permeates their fiction. In Jacob’s
Room, for instance, Woolf’s narrator is ‘choked with observations,’
struggling, like the characters, to ‘catch’ in writing the ‘unseizable, force’ of
life, which ‘hurtles’ through the universe, rendering words inept (p.155, 67). This
mirrors the experience of writing for Mansfield, who laments her ‘sensitive
mind’ which ‘receives every impression.’[52]
Interestingly, both authors capture moments of ineffable revelation in relation
to mirrors. Sandra Wentworth Williams in Jacob’s Room receives a profound
realisation while looking into a mirror but struggles to ‘grasp’ it in writing,
noting how ‘everything seems to mean so much’ (pp.140-1). She comforts herself
with her own beauty. In ‘Prelude’, Beryl immediately turns to her reflection to
confirm her physical reality after writing a letter which was ‘all perfectly
true, [but] she didn’t believe a word of it’ (SS, p.119). Dick searches
for similar solace in ‘Je ne parle pas Français’ when, after looking at
his reflection, he makes a note that ‘looking is being,’ but like Beryl,
immediately doubts the truth of his writing (SS, p.154). Woolf and
Mansfield’s characters mirror each other in these moments, briefly
comprehending the inexpressible reality of their existence by looking at their
reflections. The ghosts in these narratives further enhance their numinous quality,
as Otto writes that ineffable experience ‘has something spectral in it,’ which
is not ‘the dread of ghosts,’ but a reminder of life’s fleetingness.[53]
Smith specifically describes the ‘spectral quality’ of the two authors’ texts,
as both imbued their works with their own purgatorial realities –
creating a threshold between life and death which allowed moments of numinous
revelation.[54]
‘If she’d lived,
she’d have written on, & people would have seen that I was the more
gifted,’ Woolf would conclude of their rivalry, years later.[55]
However, her singular admission that Mansfield’s writing was ‘the only writing
[she] was ever jealous of’ would come to overshadow their similarities, becoming
Mansfield’s eternal epitaph.[56]
The authors used the same devices to articulate inexpressible grief and
numinous life, ‘gesturing towards’ the presence of the dead, and attempting to
evoke the personal feelings of the reader. Though Mansfield had joked that
Woolf ‘haunted’ her while alive, she would eventually join Thoby as a spectral
presence in Woolf’s writing after her death in 1923.[57]
Lee draws this connection, noting that Woolf reused a journal entry about
Mansfield’s death – ‘Katherine putting on a white wreath & leaving us,
called away,’ – for the death of Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse: there
was ‘someone there, [...] staying lightly by her side and then [...] raising to
her forehead a wreath of white flowers with which she went.’[58]
Bound by grief, mortality, and the ineffable comprehension
of existence, Woolf and Mansfield remain forever intertwined in the liminal
space between the ‘shadows’ of death and the flickering ‘fires’ of life.
References
[1] Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew Macneillie (Hogarth Press, 1977-84), II, 16 January 1923, p.227; Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories (Oxford University Press, 2002).
[2] Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (Vintage, 1997), p.398.
[3] DVW, I, 7 August 1918, p.179.
[4] Angela Smith, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two (Oxford Academic, 1999), pp.35-37.
[5] Smith, Public of Two, p.30; Lee, p.393.
[6] Lee, p.387.
[7] Smith, Public of Two, p.194.
[8] Lee, p.399.
[9] Smith, Public
of Two, p. 204.
[10] Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (Hogarth Press, 1960), p.14. All further references are to this edition; DVW, II, 17 February 1922, p.167.
[11] Mansfield, ‘The Garden Party’, SS, pp.336-49 (p.349).
[12] Cheryl Hindrichs, ‘The Fly and the Displaced Self’, in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, ed. by Gerri Kimber and others (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), pp.102-117 (p.105).
[13] Andrew Bennett, Katherine Mansfield (Northcote House, 2003), p.4.
[14] Katherine Mansfield, The Journal of Katherine Mansfield, ed. by John Middleton Murry (Constable & Co., 1962), October 1907, p.23; DVW, II, 25 October 1920, pp.72-3.
[15] JKM, p.107.
[16] Katherine Mansfield, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, ed. by Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott (Clarendon Press, 1984-93), III, KM to JMM, 17 November 1919, p.13.
[17] DVW, I, 28 November 1919, p.315.
[18] Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. by Nigel Nicholson and Joanne Trautmann (Chatto & Windus, 1980-3), II, VW to KM, 13 February 1921, p.350.
[19] Lee, p.398.
[20] Mansfield, ‘The Fly’, in SS, pp. 357-61 (p.357).
[21] JKM, September 1915, p.85.
[22] JKM, 14 February 1916, p.96.
[23] Ibid.
[24] JKM, November 1915, p.89, 94.
[25] Mansfield, ‘Prelude’, in SS, pp.79-120 (p.96).
[26] Bennett, p.63.
[27] JKM, November 1915, p.94.
[28] Lee, p.228.
[29] Lee, p.227.
[30] LVW, III, VW to GR, 1 May 1925, p.181.
[31] Lee, p.231.
[32] Virginia Woolf, ‘Sketch of the Past’, in Moments of Being (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), pp.61-138 (pp.108-9).
[33] Woolf, ‘Sketch of the Past’, p.121.
[34] Angela Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Katherine Mansfield: Selected Stories (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp.ix-xxxi (p.xxv).
[35] Hindrichs, p.117.
[36] Smith, ‘Introduction’, p.xxv.
[37] LVW, III, VM to RF, May 1927, p.385.
[38] JKM, 1 June 1907, p.13.
[39] DVW, II, 26 January 1920, pp.13-14; Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, in The Common Reader (Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1925), pp.207-218 (p.214).
[40] CLKM, I, KM to OM, 3 July 1917, p.315.
[41] CLKM, II, 16 July 1918, p.254.
[42] JKM, 31 May 1919, p.161.
[43] Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy (Oxford University Press, 1923), p.17.
[44] JKM, 3 May 1922, p.314; JKM, 1920, pp.202-3.
[45] JKM, 1 October 1906, p.5.
[46] Otto, p.14.
[47] Otto, p.30.
[48] Smith, Public of Two, p.1.
[49] Woolf, ‘Sketch of the Past’, p.118.
[50] Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, p.211.
[51] CLKM, II, VM to OM, 15 August 1917, p.860.
[52] JKM, 4 April 1914, p.59
[53] Otto, p.14.
[54] Smith, Public of Two, p. 204.
[55] DVW, II, 17 October 1924, pp.317-8.
[56] DVW, II, 16 January 1923, p.227.
[57] CLKM, I, 24 June 1917, p.313.
[58] DVW, II,
16 January 1923, p.226; Virginia
Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Penguin, 1993), p.197.
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