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Ecstasy and envy provoked in Virginia Woolf
It is said that after reading Bliss (Ecstasy), Virginia Woolf said: I die of envy of that woman. The woman and author of the short story is writer Katherine Mansfield. Jealous, Virginia Woolf considered her not very elegant and maintained an aristocratic and distrustful distance between them.
Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp, original name Katherine Mansfield, was born in Wellington, New Zealand, on October 14, 1888. She spent her childhood in her hometown. She traveled to London in 1903 with her two older sisters to attend Queen's College.
Considered an expert in the modernist short story, her most creative years were filled with loneliness, illness, jealousy, and alienation. All this was reflected in her work with the bitter representation of the marital and family relationships of her middle-class characters.
After the publication of The Garden Party, Katherine was established as one of the most remarkable and revolutionary short story writers of her generation. She acquired an international reputation as a writer of short stories, poetry, letters, journals, and reviews.
It was adopted by artistic circles based in Bloomsbury, a group of British artists and intellectuals, but never belonged to it. She was a woman and therefore, in some ways, an outsider in any country. Furthermore, she was a writer entirely devoted to the short story, which never enjoyed the same reputation as the novel.
But this book is me!
Clarice Lispector, one of the most important Brazilian female writers, was another great writer of the 20th century who recognized the power of Katherine Mansfield's writing. Reading the work of the New Zealander for the first time, Clarice would have said that Mansfield was herself.
The “Clarice Lispector of the English language” can be an effective way of introducing this brilliant author to the Portuguese-speaking public. There are many points in common between them – the literary work with a woman's perspective, the contemplation of daily life, human relationships, the intelligent use of silence.
Clarice discovered Mansfield's work on her own when she removed the Bliss collection from a bookstore shelf. Not knowing who it was, she started reading right there, standing up, and could not stop, taken by a deep affinity with the author: "But this book is me!" would have thought in front of the volume of short stories he acquired.
The unhappy translation of Bliss as happiness
The prestigious Brazilian writer Érico Veríssimo was the one who translated Bliss here in Brazil, in 1940, by Editora Globo. But he was unfortunate in translating bliss into Happiness. Ana Cristina Cesar, female poet and translator, seems to have hit the target when she chose the term Ecstasy. Bliss is ecstasy, happiness, joy, rapture, divine thing, palpitation, enthusiasm, fascination…
Ana immersed herself in Mansfield's letters and diary while working on the annotated translation of Bliss, which earned her a master’s degree in theory and practice of literary translation from the University of Essex, England. The reading made the Brazilian poet realize that in Mansfield's work, as in hers, “fiction and autobiography constitute a single and indivisible composition.”
Her tales and her writing technique
Considered a central figure in British modernism, her tales are innovative, accessible, and psychologically acute, pioneering the form of the genre in the 20th century. They are also notable for their use of stream of consciousness. She described trivial events and subtle changes in human behavior.
Her fiction, poetry, diaries, and letters cover a range of subjects: the difficulties and ambivalences of families and sexuality, the fragility of relationships, the complexities and insensitivities of the rising middle classes, the social consequences of war and the attempt to extract any beauty and vitality from worldly experience. Thus, she rejected the conventions of highly plotted narrative with a carefully crafted conclusion, using direct and indirect narrative and a rapid time transition to provide constant shifts in perspective.
Ellipses are a frequent feature of Mansfield, sometimes as a closure of narratives. They point out the mismatch between inner life and the way to express it and the limits of the characters' introspections, like a wall that cannot be crossed. It is an expression of everyday life more for what is unsaid than for what is revealed, so alienation from self is a successful escape from unhappiness.
Her characters are not under the spotlight, she just shows the inner life of each of them. Looks, words, facial expressions. Many subjects run through her prose: conversations about dreams and the depths of the mind, typical of a society that was awakening to the power of the Freudian unconscious. Women who constantly question their place in society. In all the writings the critics find an enormous depth of observation; a simple expression of what is untranslatable in the human soul and a complex femininity surprising the strange roots that kept her attached to life.
She carefully manipulated the autobiographical element in her work. Art always transcended reality, and remembered events or people were shaped to suit the impression it wished to convey. Perhaps her enduring appeal is due in part to the fact that, in the best of her writings, fiction or nonfiction, she communicates her individual experience in such a way that different readers can relate to her.
Writing is converted into a fictional exercise. With this, the writer establishes her gaze on things, shapes sensations caused by people and places and reveals – herself and others. Literary activity is the main reason for her reflections in her diary and letters.
A wandering and disordered life
In 1906, she returned to his father's home, aged eighteen. She came in unhappy, moody, and rebellious. Wellington was a province for a girl, already a bit of a mess with two cases of lesbianism, an obscure incident with a sailor and the death of her beloved grandmother. In 1908, she convinced her father to let her return to London. In July of the same year, she left New Zealand. She had a lot of material in her head that she would later use in her tales. In London, according to one of her biographers, she would live "a wandering and disorderly life".
The first year was a disaster. While a student at Queen's College, she had an affair with Arnold Trowell, a young cellist. On her return to London, this love had cooled, and he was transferred to his twin brother, Garnet Trowell. She continued to correspond with Arnold and formed a close friendship with a tall, gawky young woman, Ida Baker, whom she renamed Leslie Moore or LM, with whom she had, it is said, a fleeting love affair.
Her relationship with Garnett resulted in an unexpected pregnancy and she, inexplicably, became engaged to George Charles Bowden, a voice teacher. They were married on 2 March 1909 at Paddington Register Office, dressed in black, with Ida Baker as a witness. She left him on their wedding night, sexually disgusted. All this in just three weeks.
Ida Baker recounts that, in early 1911, her friend thought she was pregnant and wrote to Garnet several times, with no response. In April 1911, LM opened a bank account to help with the baby. After that, LM left for Rhodesia to visit her father. Back five months later, Baker found "no baby and a closed bank account." They never discussed the matter.
While doubts have been cast on the veracity of this version of events, it may be that some experiences in the late spring of 1911 contributed to the ambivalent views of relationships and childbirth that are evident in her work at this time and in later stories such as This Flower .
Six lonely months in Germany
Alarmed by these developments, her mother, Annie Beauchamp, traveled to England and immediately took her to the spa in Bad Wörishofen, Germany, to be treated and have the child. She left her there promising to forget her for the rest of her life! And that is what she did.
In Bavaria, Katherine suffered a miscarriage, although there are doubts about her pregnancy. The six lonely months in Germany were the basis for stories published in 1910 and 1911 in the literary periodical The New Age, edited by AR Orage. Many of them have a young narrator, and always, the female characters are alone, vulnerable, and naive, questioning their role in society and the double standard that allows men to enjoy sexual pleasures while women suffer the consequences.
Upon returning to London, Mansfield became ill with an untreated sexually transmitted disease that she had contracted from Floryan Sobieniowski, a Polish emigrant translator she had met in Germany. This contributed to her poor health for the rest of her life.
John Middleton Murry, her second husband and future editor
In 1911, she met Oxford student John Middleton Murry, editor of Rhythm magazine, writer and socialist. At her invitation, he became her tenant, then her lover.
The next two years were important for Mansfield's growth as a writer – she published several New Zealand-themed stories – but there were constant financial worries and frequent changes of address. Together, they edited Rhythm and Blue Review, but they were unable to avoid Murry's bankruptcy, which followed her stay in Paris at the end of 1913. It was only after 1917, in the face of the profound shock that the First World War brought him, with the death of her dear brother, that his true genius would manifest itself in all its breadth with the story Prelude.
After divorcing her first husband in 1918, Mansfield married Murry. In the same year she learned that she had tuberculosis. Their relationship was an unconventional, often tormented one. Though their mutual regard was deep, they often misunderstood each other's needs.
Mansfield demanded increasingly unconditional love and attention, which Murry often failed to provide; it was LM who offered unquestioning devotion and practical support. For the rest of Mansfield's short life, Murry and LM were indispensable to her, but for distinct reasons.
Mansfield and Murry often lived apart for extended periods, but they corresponded faithfully. In addition to writing hundreds of letters, partly as a substitute for conversation, Mansfield filled notebooks and notebooks with thoughts, feelings, story drafts, observations, and ideas.
Intense literary production, despite illness
Her first tuberculous bleeding occurred in February 1918. Thus began his race against time: how unbearable it would be to die – leaving 'remnants', 'pieces'... nothing really finished. Although her tuberculosis was worse, she refused to enter a sanatorium. Instead, in September 1919, at the beginning of the English winter, she moved with LM to Ospedaletti, an Italian commune in the Liguria region of the province of Imperia. Her disappointment at Murry's passivity and apparent reluctance to support her led her to write The Man Without Temper in January 1920.
Mansfield moved to Switzerland in May 1921. Murry gave up the Athenaeum editorship to take it. At Chalet des Sapins, Montana-sur-Sierre, she wrote some of New Zealand's most famous stories: On the Bay, The Garden Party and The Doll's House. The first two were published in The Garden Party and Other Stories in February 1922.
She, in desperation, underwent painful radiotherapy in Paris. While there, she met James Joyce and wrote The Fly. Tired, she traveled back to Switzerland, where she completed her last story, The Canary, set in New Zealand.
Despite the advanced state of her tuberculosis, she planned another series of twelve connected stories that would form the main section of a new book, thus becoming the third part of the story that began with Prelude and continued in On the Bay.
Healing the soul, not the body
Influenced by mystical thinkers like PD Ouspensky, she was convinced that to regain health and fulfill her ambitions, she should try to heal the soul, not the body. She was determined to write stories free of cynicism, to lead a new kind of life, to become a child of the sun. In October, she entered GI Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Avon-Fontainebleau, near Paris. Her last letters to her family, LM and Murry, show that in that community she finally found something of the resolution she was looking for.
Murry visited her on January 9, 1923. That same night she died of a pulmonary hemorrhage, aged thirty-four, at the Gurdjieff Institute, near Fontainebleau, France. Her last words were I love the rain. I want the feel of it on my face.
Posthumous publications
Katherine left her manuscripts, notebooks and letters to her husband for his disposal, with a request that he "let it all be fair". In what was seen by some as a betrayal of that trust, Murry used his papers selectively to compile the journal of Katherine Mansfield in 1927.
In 1939, he selected more material from the same sources to produce The Scrapbook of Katherine Mansfield, and in 1954, he published an expansion, called the 'definitive edition'. He also published two volumes of Katherine Mansfield's Letters in 1928, and Katherine Mansfield's Letters to John Middleton Murry, 1913-1922 in 1951.
Ironically – for Mansfield had described herself as “a secretive creature down to my very bones” – her most private comments and reflections, diary, letters, and scrapbook were edited by her husband, who ignored her wish that he “tear up and burn as much as possible” the papers she left behind. But her husband, managing his wife's work, has been censoring excerpts from her diary and entire letters from her correspondence, trying to erase any “negative” image of Katherine's life.
There was a double irony in that Murry's careful editing gave the impression that she was impeccable. By February 1923, she was already being described as "the holiest of women". Murry managed to create a cult of personality, and this no doubt contributed to the growth of Mansfield's international reputation after her death. He understood that the writings she left were real, spontaneous, the most vivid, the most delicate and the most beautiful that the English could read at the beginning of the 20th century.
Katherine Mansfield was a victim of tuberculosis, as well as the Ukrainian Marie Bashkirtseff and the Japanese Higuchi Ichiyô. All of them, in addition to the Brazilian Carolina Maria de Jesus, left their diaries.
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