Katherine Mansfield and the Aesthetic Object (Critical Essay‪)‬

Filtered through the prism of material culture studies, the renewed interest in literary aesthetics has generated increasingly fruitful discussion of the aestheticized or aesthetic object. The focus here is Katherine Mansfield's response to and treatment of certain everyday objects with particular attention to the 'little lamp' of 'The Doll's House'--and the significance of such objects in her fiction and to her life. It is not my intention to claim that Mansfield was altogether unique in her response to the material world; after all, she shared D. H. Lawrence's 'extraordinary sensitiveness to what Wordsworth called "unknown modes of being"' (Aldington 1950:7). Rather I would offer one kind of answer to the question posed by Virginia Woolf in The Waves: 'But what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?' In his autobiographical Montmartre A Vingt Ans (1938), Francis Carco, a friend and one-time lover of Mansfield, records his awareness of her hyper-sensitivity in the following terms: 'Elle eprouvait une tendresse pour les choses quotidiennes les plus humbles' (p.186). One special manifestation of that 'tendresse' was the capacity to invest inanimate objects with life and even to enter into, to take possession of, them. Mansfield's letter to the painter, Dorothy Brett (11 October 1917) about her still life paintings, provides a prime example: