The Garden Party and Other Stories - Katherine Mansfield [4]
She was full of loathing for the Beauchamp world – ‘Darm my family… I detest them all heartily’ – and she began to stand back from it, and see it with vengeful coldness, as a confidence trick on women:
Here then is a little summary of what I need – power, wealth and freedom. It is the hopelessly insipid doctrine that love is the only thing in the world, taught, hammered into women, from generation to generation, which hampers us so cruelly. We must get rid of that bogey…
By ‘love’ she meant love-and-marriage of course. Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949) would quote Mansfield’s autobiographical Beauchamp stories with special approval, for the clarity with which they identified the mystificatory processes that entrap women. She picks out a passage from ‘Prelude’, where the unmarried sister Beryl (based on Mansfield’s young aunt Belle) admires her own guitar-playing, as a splendid example of the way ‘the romantic desire for a woman’s destiny’ is fuelled by narcissism and the cult of self. And from ‘At the Bay’ Beauvoir quotes at length the passage where Linda Burnell thinks about her husband and the doubtful meanings of ‘love’ – including her dread of having children – and concludes that Mansfield as good as demonstrates ‘that no maternal “instinct” exists’. The stories refuse to honour conventional sentiments – that is part of their modernity, and their courage and distinctiveness. Beauvoir said rather solemnly that this was because Mansfield looked at her characters in the light of their ‘total situation’. Another writer, Willa Gather, had put it more expressively: ‘I doubt whether any contemporary writer has made one feel more keenly the many kinds of personal relations which exist in an everyday ”happy family” who are merely going on living their daily lives… every individual in that household (even the children) is clinging passionately to his individual soul, is in terror of losing it in the general family flavour’ (Not Under Forty, 1936). With the young Kathleen/Katherine, this ‘terror’ became so acute, and so uncomfortable to everyone else, that in 1908 she was allowed to do as she wished, and leave once more for London, after eighteen months of ‘home’.
She would never return, except in imagination. But before she became the woman who could write up the Beauchamps in this fashion, and turn them into the luminous characters of her fiction, she would have many adventures. Before she really became a professional writer at all, indeed, she herself lived rather like a character in a book – though in her case, it was as the heroine of a picaresque novel, ‘modern’ and ‘episodic’ to excess. An account of her first year and a bit will set the tone of her new life. On arrival she more or less adopted the musical Trowell family, known from New Zealand, but her affair with the son, Garnet, foundered on his parents’ disapproval. In a bizarre gesture of defiance, in March 1909, she married a mild-mannered English admirer with artistic hobbies, a man she hardly knew called George Bowden, and left him on their wedding day to join Garnet, who was in the orchestra of an opera company touring the provinces. In May (by now she was pregnant) her mother arrived in London, carried her off to a Bavarian spa town, left her there to have the baby, returned to New Zealand, and briskly cut her disgraceful daughter out of her will (her father, however, would continue to send her an allowance during her life). Meanwhile Katherine had a miscarriage, collected material for stories by