'Too Perfectly Historical for Words': Reading Sociably at the Katherine Mansfield Birthplace/Te Puakitanga (Viewpoint Essay‪)‬

There is a way of reading--not quite literary, and not at all solitary--that I like to think of as sociable. Sociability in reading is more than social reading in that it entails not just the presence of others in the reading but also congeniality and amiability: it requires the sense of a community not just of interest, but of enjoyment and affection, (1) In sociable readings, literary works are of secondary importance to the social function of reading, as they serve to underscore writers' status and guarantee the prestige of both writer and sociable readers rather than to act as a site of direct engagement or contestation: direct consideration of works is counter-productive to the goals of social connection and community maintenance. Sociable reading takes many forms, all centred around the pious reverence not for texts, but for an assemblage of objects, personages and places surrounding a text. Attention to these can better and less controversially sustain a community than can attention to the texts themselves. Sociable reading consists of what Helen Deutsch calls 'author love'. (2) To love an author sociably means more than to love texts. It mimics the relation between revealed religious texts and their divine origins--or, rather, the human conduits of the Word: its scribe-saints are the bodily writers behind the creation of literary texts, and its shrines are literary museums. Literary museums present a closed-off perfect history of the individual writer, usually situated in a recursive reading of the relationship between the Life and Works. The Katherine Mansfield Birthplace/Te Puakitanga is one such place. The Birthplace is only one of the most recent real-world efforts to remember or bring about the memory of the historical Katherine Mansfield in spaces close to those she occupied in her childhood. The first was a memorial tram-stop near the site of the Fitzherbert Street House where the Beauchamps lived at the time of Mansfield's final departure from New Zealand. The tram-stop was funded by Sir Harold Beauchamp soon after Mansfield's death. When the surroundings were razed with the construction of the motorway in the 1960s elements of the tram-stop were used in what is now the larger Katherine Mansfield Memorial Park, which takes in the area of about twelve of the destroyed homes near the site. The far more ambitious memorial project of the Birthplace was undertaken when it was discovered that not only had the Beauchamps' first house on Tinakori Road not been destroyed during the construction of the motorway, as had previously been believed, but that it was for sale. A committee was soon formed to 'acquire, preserve, maintain and re-use the birthplace of Wellington's most famous daughter, Katherine Mansfield, a writer of international renown, and to foster appreciation and understanding of her work and her time'. (3) The first of these objectives was achieved mid-1987, and the goal of establishing the house as a museum to both Mansfield and her times was set for the writer's centennial the following August.