Knowing What We Feel about Katherine Mansfield: Sentimentality and Expression in ‘The Garden Party’

Summary

What we feel about Katherine Mansfield often depends on what we feel about her literary project – which, in large part, is itself about the expression of feelings. For Mansfield, the short-story form often serves as a vehicle for exploring intense if brief moments of emotion triggered by the conditions of modernity, but often from the subjectivities of those characters most often associated with popular Victorian fiction, such as the poor, or children, or dames seules. Critics both during her lifetime and after have often been distressed by this more sentimental side to Mansfield’s fiction. While, for decades, Mansfield scholarship attended to the more avant-garde and overtly political tendencies within her fictions, it is true that though her writing often circulated in experimental modernist journals like Rhythm and The New Age, she also attracted a large audience within more popular and even middlebrow periodicals, such as the London Mercury, the Westminster Gazette and the Sphere. Mansfield’s popular accessibility, coupled with her interest in exploring intense feeling, often made her an object of derision among many of her modernist cohort, both before and after her early death, such that Chris Mourant has noted, ‘Mansfield’s contemporaries often accused her of producing “sentimental” writing.’ T. S. Eliot, who famously decreed in his 1919 manifesto ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ against the ‘turning loose’ of emotion in poetry, dismissed her in a letter to Ezra Pound not long before her death as ‘a sentimental crank’, while Leonard Woolf also bemoaned in his memoir Beginning Again that he saw her unhappily enmeshed in ‘cheap sentimentality’. After Mansfield’s death, Woolf’s wife, Virginia, who considered her both a colleague and a rival, dismissed her stories to Vita Sackville-West thus:

I gave up reading them […] because of their cheap sharp sentimentality, which was all the worse, I thought, because she had, as you say, the zest and the resonance – I mean she could permeate one with her quality; and if one felt this cheap scent in it, it reeked in one’s nostrils.

Even the later modernist writers who greatly admired Mansfield would regretfully admit something similar. Elizabeth Bowen, who noted her awe over ‘the stretching promise’ of Mansfield’s fiction, observed, ‘Now and then the emotional level of her writing drops; a whimsical, petulant little-girlishness disfigures a few of the lesser stories.