Katherine Mansfield: Distance, Irony, And the Vertigo Perception‪.‬

Is there a Me?' (1) Katherine Mansfield's question, asked shortly before dying, recurs throughout her writing, rippling from short story to short story and forming concentric circles, bound to disappear, and yet crucial to the pattern. It is a question which, apart from laying bare her concern with the state of the self and the nature of subjectivity, perceived, in quite modernist terms, as inwardly fragmented, suggests a preoccupation with distance: the distance between subject and object, self and non-self.