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of the means of expression of an art, which is the art of painting, into the domain of another art, which is the art of writing.’3 M. E. Kronegger claims that the ‘common denominator’ in both literary and painterly Impressionism is the artists’ ‘manner of suggesting reality.’ In his survey of the term, J. Theodore Johnson Jr. concludes: Literary Impressionism ‌ consists of such aspects as a fresh, pictorial way of seeing and translating reality wherein a few elements serve to suggest a total impression, the use of the painterly (pittoresque) imperfect in place of the narrative preterite, dependent clauses, grammatical dislocation, suppression of the verb of conjunction, adjectives that could apply to several nouns, [and] thoughts and feelings translated through the language of the senses.5

Melissa Reimer

Katherine Mansfield’s work contains an elusive quality and for this reason both the artist and her short stories continue to elude critics and defy concrete categorisation. The constant recourse to different stylistic tendencies throughout her mature fiction has led critics to variously conclude that she is a feminist, a social satirist, a sentimental childhood story writer, a writer of colonial stories reminiscent of the Australian outback school and, more convincingly, a colonial modernist.

One of the most striking features of her writing is its pictorial quality which demonstrates a heightened aestheticism and points towards a congruent knowledge of developments and trends in the visual arts, particularly Impressionism. This is demonstrated not only in her stories but also in her notebooks and letters. Although Mansfield failed to acknowledge the primary influence of any one artist, school or style, her work demonstrates an allegiance to Impressionism in the subjects, themes and issues she chose to address and the techniques she employed to realise them. This paper draws on my research into Mansfield’s early exposure to Impressionism in New Zealand and abroad and considers the painterly quality of her work, shaped by that exposure, in her stories from 1907, specifically within her domestic interiors where Mansfield offers estranged family portraits, exposes the duality of women and undermines traditional notions of femininity.

Vincent O’Sullivan, Julia van Gunsteren, Kate Fullbrook, Ulrich Weisstein and Frieder Busch have noted the Impressionist influence in Mansfield’s work and have, to limited degrees, shown that she took the key elements of that style and applied them to her own literature.1 Van Gunsteren understands this as transliteration and locates Mansfield as a Literary Impressionist.2 Ferdinand Brunetière, who first employed the term in his 1879 review-article ‘L’Impressionnisme dans le roman’, endeavours to explicate Literary Impressionism: it is ‘a systematic transposition

Certainly Johnson’s findings correlate with the syntactical techniques employed by Mansfield.

Johnson notes that for some critics Literary Impressionism is relevant only within the context of French Impressionist painting. However, although she understands Mansfield’s prose within the context of Literary Impressionism, van Gunsteren discusses ‘the interrelationship with painting ‌ fleetingly ‌ [because] it is literature that must be at the heart [of her work as a] comparatist ‌ and it is literary devices that must be investigated.’6 Critics who recognise the impressionistic impulse in Mansfield’s writing have not attempted to establish when and where Mansfield encountered Impressionism. They also remain reluctant to align her texts with specific paintings or to make anything more than generalisations, such as Fullbrook’s observation that the identity of Mansfield’s characters ‘is as impermanent as the dappled moments in a Renoir or a Manet.’7 Van Gunsteren remains unconvinced that Mansfield consciously sought to imitate the Impressionist painters and points out that she makes few and brief references to specific artists within her letters.8 I would argue that those artists Mansfield did discuss – Édouard Manet, James Whistler, Auguste Renoir, Paul CĂŠzanne and Vincent van Gogh – points to the type of art in which she was interested and thus had a bearing on the aesthetic dimensions of her writing.

Impressionism is, at best, an umbrella term under which regional and national varieties of painting, poetry, prose and music developed in the latter half of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth century. The scope of this paper allows for only a broad and general overview of the history of Impressionism.9 My interest lies specifically in that material which provides a means to understanding and interpreting the collision of the painterly with the literary in Mansfield’s work.

The artists who became known as the Impressionists – a title ascribed to them by the contemporary press and which they only reluctantly accepted – did not produce a manifesto that set forth their aims or clarified their aesthetic principles. The first Impressionist exhibition was held in Paris in 1874 and the paintings displayed demonstrated that the IndĂŠpendants – the name they wanted to be known by – were as diverse in their artistic endeavours as they were unified. Manet never exhibited with the Impressionists in his life-time and yet art history locates him as the father of the movement. Because for Mansfield, Manet and Renoir both fell under the umbrella of Impressionism – she referred to them as ‘those French painters’ 10 – for the purpose of this essay, I shall discuss them both within the context of Impressionism, along with Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, the latter of whom Mansfield made no mention of –

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at least within her extant papers – but with whose paintings her prose shares stylistic similarities which transcend their respective mediums.

The Impressionists rejected subjects from ancient history and were self-consciously modern in their choice of subject matter. This was in large part due to the influence of Charles Baudelaire’s seminal essay The Painter of Modern Life (1863). Since his Salon of 1846, Baudelaire had championed modernity and his call to artists to paint modern subjects, particularly the urban variety of Paris, was met with enthusiasm from painters, including Manet and his close associates. The Impressionists responded by favouring every-day subjects drawn from the close observation of people within their own environment – from the bourgeoisie to the working class and those who lived at the fringe of society. Their subjects included the opera and the ballet, café society and modern phenomena, such as rail travel. Ostensibly the Impressionists ignored political events,11 but in their juxtaposition of both the celebratory and the sordid aspects of modern life on the new boulevards of Paris, they implicitly acknowledged the effects of Baron Haussmann’s redevelopment of the city which dispossessed a majority of the lower classes of their homes.

These images are wrought with ambiguity and offer multiple readings.

The Impressionists shared and demonstrated an interest in the momentary effects of light, atmosphere and movement and paid heed to seasonal changes, privileging the role of the senses in the observation and recording of the transitory and the ephemeral. They painted on smaller scale canvases and worked in a high-key colour palette. They employed broad, often loosely articulated brush strokes which attested to the gestural nature of painting and which lent the works a sketchy, unfinished quality – more obviously in the work of Monet than in Degas’s oil paintings – and which was intended to denote the flux and rapidity of modern life. This was reinforced in the sometimes oblique angles from which they represented their subjects and which owed to their choice of unusual vantage points, such as balconies or backstage, which allowed for only a limited view – a glimpse – of the action. Their common goal, and the feature that defines their work, was their commitment to capturing the quintessence of a specific moment in time. This resulted in works that deny conclusive all-encompassing panoramic views and instead represent mere slices of life.

painter and the story takes place in Port Willin, a fictional town that is based on Wellington, New Zealand. In her description of this place, Mansfield merges elements of the French landscapes of Cézanne, particularly his views of L’Estaque, (for example, The Sea near L’Estaque (1879-79)) and the city of her childhood, effectively rendering the colonial within an Impressionist context: It’s a small town ... planted at the edge of a fine deep harbour like a lake. Behind it, on either side, there are hills. The houses are built of light painted wood. They have iron roofs coloured red. And there are big dark plumy trees massed together, breaking up those light shapes, giving a depth—warmth—making a composition of it well worth looking at ...13 Mansfield then describes the town’s buildings in a manner which points to her affinity with exoticism and Impressionism’s interest in Japonisme, particularly the characteristic delineated and flat colour planes: ‘There was a theatre too, a big bare building plastered over with red and blue bills which gave it an oriental air in that blue air, and a touring company was playing ‘San Toy.’’14 There is then an implicit acknowledgement of Degas’s imagery – an artist whose work Mansfield favoured:15 ‘The inside smelled of gas, of glue and burnt paper. Whistling drafts cut along the corridors – a strong wind among the orchestra kept the palms trembling, and now and again the curtain blew out and there was a glimpse of a pair of large feet walking rapidly away.’16 Mansfield’s description is reminiscent of several of Degas’s oblique compositions which render the incidental and transitory aspects of a scene; for example, The Orchestra at the Opera (c.1870) in which the composition has been divided, zig-zag fashion, allowing only partial glimpses of the orchestra and the dancers beyond, and also The Song of the Dog (c.1876-77) where the artist pays particular attention to the effect of the gas lights against the shimmering trees. Mansfield mimics both the sensory elements and compositional form characteristic of Degas. Mansfield’s subjective, image-saturated descriptions continue, evoking the style of Renoir or Cassatt, whose paintings of fashionable theatre-goers pointed to the spectacle that they were both witness to, and participants of: But what women! What girls in muslin dresses with velvet sashes and little caps edged with swansdown! In the intervals long ripples of laughter sounded from the stalls, from the dress circle. And I leaned against a pillar that looked as though it was made of wedding-cake icing—and fell in love with whole rows at a time ...17

These, the most significant and defining features of Impressionism, correspond with Mansfield’s preoccupations, and with the effects she achieved in her early experimental vignettes and her mature stories. In the fleeting glimpses, or ‘slices of life’, within which time does not follow conventional or chronological linearity; in the lack of conventional plot or denouement; the limited and shifting and subjective viewpoints which privilege the role of the senses; the pictorial, evocatively rendered landscapes – both urban and rural – within which weather and garden-imagery represent the passage of time and highlight the transience of life; in her emphasis on light, colour and atmosphere and her preference for seemingly insignificant detail within a scene; and in her consistently modern subject matter, Mansfield’s vision closely corresponds with that demonstrated in the work of the Impressionist painters.12

When writing this story, Mansfield might have had in mind Renoir’s The Loge (1873) and Cassatt’s Lydia in a Loge Wearing a Pearl Necklace (1879). The artist-protagonist in ‘Daphne’ acknowledges that his work is somewhat avant-garde, and that the residents of Port Willin were ‘still trying to swallow Rossetti, and Hope [sic] by Watts’,18 but claims, in a clear reference to Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), ‘I’m by no means and out-and-out modern ... people like violins ... leave me cold.’19

In the pictorial story ‘Daphne’ (1921), which she began drafting in 1907, Mansfield made clear her knowledge of modern art and where her aesthetic preferences lay. Her male protagonist is a

During her most formative years Mansfield encountered Impressionism at every turn. Through the art dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, the modern French painters had been exhibiting in London

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Mansfield returned to London just prior to the highly influential exhibition ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ (1910), which featured works by Cézanne, van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Picasso, Henri Matisse and others. Impressionism and its successor Post Impressionism was everywhere; it permeated art criticism, influenced literature and remained a significant force in British art at this time. Mansfield referred to this exhibition in a letter of 1921 expressing her appreciation for van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888): That picture seemed to reveal something that I hadn’t realised before I saw it. It lived with me afterwards. It still does – that & another of a sea captain in a flat cap. They taught me something about writing which was queer – a kind of freedom – or rather, a shaking free.24 Based on these retrospective comments and on her close association with artists practising in this style, particularly via her involvement with the journal Rhythm,25 scholars have attempted to locate Mansfield within Post Impressionism. Certainly, their rich and vibrant colours and lyrical landscapes resonated with her. However, a vignette entitled ‘In the Botanical Gardens’ (1907), demonstrates that she was, at this earlier stage, familiar with the distinguishing features of impressionism and that it was already informing her work.26

on an annual, if limited, basis since 1870. However, British audiences, including Mansfield who was at that time at Queen’s College, London, had their first proper taste of Impressionism in 1905, with an exhibition of over 300 pictures and paintings at the Grafton Gallery which included work

by Manet, Monet, Degas, Lucien Pissarro, Cézanne, Renoir and Morisot.20 Although in France Impressionism was no longer at the forefront of painting developments, its impact and influence on British artists and the art public at this time was significant; see, for example, William Orpen’s, Cafe Royal, London (1912). Following this period of European acculturation Mansfield spent eighteen months back in New Zealand. Her then closest friend was the artist Edith Bendall, whose work featured in the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts exhibition of 1907 alongside the work of New Zealand-born and immigrant artists practising an attenuated version of the Impressionist landscape.21 Newspaper reviews of exhibitions at The Academy and at the independent McGregor-Wright Gallery during 1907 and 1908 specifically note the developments being made in Impressionism. The term, ‘Impressionism’, however, was also used pejoratively by the press to denote works of a high colour and sketchy finish.22 In a letter to the Editor of the Evening Post an art enthusiast complains that the majority of the works exhibited in February 1908 were ‘devoid of any one of ... [the] essential elements [of Art]’ and blames ‘this futility of effort’ on the artists ‘expressing their emotions in the manner of the modern ‘impressionist’ school.’

The letter concludes with a caution against ‘the temporary vogue of hurry, skurry, and splash.’23

Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Berger, 1882, oil on 96 x96130 cm.cm. Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Berger, 1882, oil canvas, on canvas, x 130 Courtesy TheThe Samuel Courtauld Trust, Courtauld Gallery, London.

Courtesy Samuel Courtauld Trust, Courtauld Gallery, London.

The draft copy of ‘In the Botanical Gardens’ in Mansfield’s notebooks varies only slightly from the published version but is significant in that it locates the gardens in New Zealand, and not the Kew Gardens, London. Mansfield’s decision to leave the location ambiguous reveals her desire to distance herself from her provincial origins and attempt to internationalise her work. More significantly, it is one of her earliest attempts at assimilating foreign aesthetics into an otherwise colonial sketch. Specifically, Mansfield observes that the people in Wellington’s public gardens ‘seem as meaningless, as lacking in individuality, as the little figures in an impressionist landscape – here only because they ‘tone in.’27 Her description corresponds with a number of Impressionist works,28 particularly Monet’s The Garden of the Princess (1867), the focus of which is one of the new urban spaces that bore testament to Baron Haussmann’s redevelopments under Napoléon III’s rule. In Monet’s Garden the people who populate that space are denied any real identity; instead, their purpose within that realm is merely decorative, indicative of the spectacle that constituted bourgeois living and which was the primary social role of bourgeois women particularly. The creation of these civilised spaces entailed significant demolition, particularly of the numerous unsightly ramshackle buildings and homes, which, like the ‘mean’ little cottages in Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’, ‘were the greatest possible eyesore and they had no right to be in that neighbourhood at all.’29 Monet’s depiction does not necessarily amount to a damning critique of contemporary society, but nor is it a celebratory image of progress and modernisation. Rather, it acknowledges the dislocation and displacement that constitutes the modern society. This was something Mansfield could relate to. Her fractured subjectivity was a condition of colonisation as well as of modernity. On her camping holiday through the Urewera region, she experienced at first hand the effects of colonisation, modernisation and progress on the Maori people and the natural landscape, particularly the scars left by deforestation and the abandoned whares (houses).30

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Mansfield describes the Gardens as ‘a subtle combination of the artificial and the natural’ – a notion which fits well with specific Parisian spaces where nature is orderly and contrived, such as the Tuilleries, as depicted by Manet.31 The content and style of both the draft and the final script lacks the control demonstrated in Mansfield’s mature work; it shows the still potent influence of Oscar Wilde and, in parts, echoes Maoriland writing of the period. More importantly, this early experimental example points to the writer she would become by revealing her tendency to appropriate and modify different stylistic traits in the development of her own signature style.

Her referencing of native New Zealand elements, such as cabbage trees and ferns, within an Impressionist landscape suggests that she recognised the potential of the aesthetic principles of Impressionism though she had not yet fully realised the formula for her own purposes. Weisstein points to the role of the senses in impressionist aesthetics stating that, ‘the only reality worth considering is that of the surface, which is precisely what Impressionism (which deserves the label ‘Sensationism’) is all about.’32 Like the Impressionists, Mansfield’s intention was to render the effect of a scene or event upon the spectator and she relied on surface detail to do this. She describes ‘the bright dresses of the women, the sombre clothing of the men’ and ‘On the green moss, on the brown earth, a wide splashing of yellow sunlight.’33 Her description is reminiscent of Monet’s Luncheon on the Grass, (1866), which the International Society exhibited in London in 1904, and which was reproduced in The Studio magazine in 1903 and 1904. Mansfield acknowledges the ‘laughter and movement and bright sunlight’ but also the presence of ‘vague forms lurking in the shadow staring at me malevolently ...’ 34 In Monet’s group portrait one of the men is separated from the group and only partially visible within the shadow behind the tree. Another of the male figures stares out at the viewer, eluding to and challenging the role of spectator. The remaining male figures are either engaged in conversation with the women or observing that interaction. The two central female figures seated on a picnic blanket, call to mind Mansfield’s characterisation in another early vignette, ‘In a Cafe’ (1907) in which she describes the young woman as having ‘an expression at once of intense eagerness and anticipated disillusion.’35 The heart and arrow carved into the tree trunk is subtly suggestive of the picnicking group’s latent sexuality and corresponds with the anticipation and disillusion Mansfield describes here and elsewhere in her stories.36 Mansfield’s pictorial description, in the context of Monet’s imagery, calls to mind Kate Fullbrook’s observation that ‘the darkness of her art is one of its hallmarks.

While the surfaces of her stories often flash with sparkling detail, the underlying tones are sombre, threatening, and register the danger present in the most innocent seeming aspects of life.’37 Fullbrook’s summation is indicative of the often thinly veiled critique of bourgeois society in Mansfield’s stories, within which vulnerable young women are often at the mercy of domineering men, either of their social class, or above it.

Mansfield’s affinity with Impressionism, then, is demonstrated not just in the pictorial and painterly quality of her work, but also thematically. The existence of many of her female protagonists’ involves a precarious balancing of the false identities that society ascribes them and the real selves which they oppress, but which threaten to surface and jeopardise their composure; for example, Bertha in ‘Bliss’ (1918). This duplicity features in Impressionism too. While Renoir’s images of women are often idealised, decorative and focused on the pastimes available to the middle and upper classes, Manet and Degas depicted non-communicative couples and strained

family relationships; for example, Manet, In the Conservatory (1879); Degas, The Bellelli Family (1858-67). In their representations of bourgeois leisure and comfortable domesticity both Manet and Degas in fact point to fractures within families – something which was perceived as relating to the individual’s increasing sense of isolation within modern society, and a theme which permeates modernism. Mansfield returns to the theme of dysfunctional families frequently, with limited communication between husbands and wives and parents and their children constituting the story itself; for example, Edie and her mother in ‘A Weak Heart’ (1921) and Stanley Burnell and his daughters in ‘Prelude’ (1918) and ‘At the Bay’ (1922). The dislocation between her couples is revealed in their interior monologues, which are entirely at odds with their shared dialogue.38 However, in her domestic portraits specifically, Mansfield’s characterisation provides a good model for comparison with the paintings of the female Impressionist, Morisot. Both artists expose the duality of women and challenge conventional notions of femininity. Morisot and her colleague, Cassatt, acknowledge the notion of the female as spectacle – a dominant theme in Impressionism but more ambiguous in the work of female artists. Whereas Renoir points to the decorative role of women, particularly in his portraits of women at the opera, Morisot and Cassatt make explicit how contrived and laborious the process is. Morisot’s Young Woman Powdering Herself (1883) and Cassatt’s The Fitting (1891) remind the viewer of the ornamental role of women, both within the realm of the arts as models and subjects, and within fashionable society. Morisot doubly makes this point in The Coiffure (1894), which shows a young woman having her hair put up, presumably before dressing for a ball. In the background Morisot includes an earlier portrait, The Black Bodice (1876), showing the woman dressed and ready for display. Mansfield plays on this theme particularly through Beryl who moves to stand under the flattering lamp-light, or is poised before her reflection at mirrors and windows. Beryl grapples with the self she shows Stanley and Nan Pym and the real self who cringes at the enforced vanity: She jumped up and half unconsciously, half consciously she drifted over to the looking-glass ‘Yes, my dear, there is no doubt about it, you really are a lovely little thing.’ … But even as she looked the smile faded from her lips and eyes. Oh God, there she was, back again, playing the same old game. False—false as ever ‘I’m always acting a part. I’m never my real self for a moment.’ 39 Beryl’s entire persona is a charade and the real Beryl is deemed not suitable for public consumption.

By depicting their subjects in front of mirrors and at their toilette, the artists point specifically to the facade that constituted femininity.40 In a letter to Berthe shortly after her marriage, Mme. Morisot advises ‘that you owe it to your husband to dress well for him and to please others in order to please him more.’41 Anne Higonnet suggests that in her dual roles as wife and mother, and professional artist, Morisot lived behind a facade of her own careful creation. Higonnet points to Morisot’s art which she perceives is ‘radiant and calm [indicative of ] a life led soberly’ versus the letters which reveal the doubt and struggle that constituted the constant negotiation of her life and career.42 Another more significant way in which Morisot and Mansfield undermine femininity and the role of women, is by depicting mothers as detached from their dependants. Morisot’s family

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portraits are ambiguous in that the mothers seem aloof from their children. She paints the figures as physically separate from one another and rarely engaged in conversation or united in an action; for example, Reading (1869-70). She also either limits or prevents more meaningful collaboration by creating vertical and horizontal barriers within the composition which reinforce that sense of dislocation; for example, View of Paris from the Trocadéro (1872). Within her interior scenes the spatial divisions lend the work a striking sense of claustrophobia. This is a recurrent feature in Mansfield’s prose. In ‘Prelude’, seated on the horse-drawn buggy, Linda creates a physical barrier between herself and her two younger daughters. She also insists on taking the ‘absolute necessities’ – ‘Holdalls, bags and boxes’ – and refuses to take her children, citing the lack of room available to accommodate them.43 In ‘At the Bay’, Linda is entirely indifferent to the baby boy, and even less interested in her three little girls: It was all very well to say it was the common lot of women to bear children. It wasn’t true. She, for one, could prove that wrong. She was broken, made weak, her courage was gone ... No, it was as though a cold breath had chilled her through and through on each of those awful journeys ...44 Linda avoids all physical and emotional contact with her children and barely tolerates her husband’s physicality, retreating into a dream space when his demands rise.

The theme of the detached mother is very subtle in Morisot’s The Cradle (1872). On the surface this painting represents a modern-take on the traditional Madonna subject, conveying a sense of tranquil domesticity in keeping with public taste and expectations, particularly from the brush of a female artist. However, here and elsewhere in Morisot’s work, the woman’s mood is difficult to gauge – boredom, resignation or indifference? Underlying this seemingly innocuous image of motherhood, Morisot reflects on the plight of women; the diaphanous blinds reinforce this notion by slightly obscuring the sleeping baby and the backdrop.45 Morisot captures the loneliness, the isolation and the inescapable boredom which constitutes what Mansfield so aptly coined ‘the suitable appropriate existence’ – bourgeois marriage and motherhood – and which she explores throughout her stories.46 Linda reflects on her marriage to Stanley; she ponders the rare ‘glimpses, moments, breathing spaces of calm’ but resents that ‘all the rest of the time... was spent in rescuing him ... and listening to his story. And what was left of her time was spent in the dread of having children.’47 Although ostensibly images of domestic tranquillity, the underlying message in Morisot’s paintings and in Mansfield’s stories is of domestic entrapment.

In conclusion, Mansfield’s attention to and acute rendering of the particular light, colours, and vibrations in an environment, the tone and atmosphere she evokes and the recurrent motifs employed in both her cafe scenes and her domestic interiors demonstrate that she shared the preoccupations of the French Impressionists. Her stories convey moments of heightened apprehension and subsequent epiphany that painters, writers and musicians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were trying to capture within their respective mediums. Her vignettes are fleeting glimpses and present an individual perspective informed by sense-impressions. An interdisciplinary approach reveals thematic and structural parallels between Mansfield’s cafe and

street scenes and the urban landscapes of Manet and Degas particularly in the respective artists’ portrayal of lonely and isolated individuals and the imagery which points to the fragmentary nature of modern society. This methodology also reveals links between the ways in which Mansfield and Morisot depict women and children within the private and public spheres. Impressionism, then, provided Mansfield with the impetus and the tools with which to depict her memories of a colonial childhood and her experiences in modern Europe. Her preoccupations were essentially those of all artists at the fin-de-siècle and many of her themes and narrative strategies came to characterise modernism. Categorically, however, the techniques employed and effects achieved

by Mansfield correspond with those realised by the Impressionists in paint.

1

2

3

4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12

13 14

15

See: O’Sullivan’s comments in ed. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 5 Volumes: 1984-2008: V. 1: 1903-1917, V. 2: 1918-1919, V. 3: 1919-1920, V. 4: 1920-1921, V. 5: 1922-1923), 1:xiii Julia Van Gunsteren, Katherine Mansfield and Literary Impressionism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990) Kate Fullbrook, Katherine Mansfield (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1986), 64–65: Ulrich Weisstein ‘Butterfly Wings Without a Framework of Steel?: The Impressionism of Katherine Mansfield’s Short Story Her First Ball’ in ed. E. Schmidt, Literatur und bildende kunst: ein hanbuch zur Theorie und Praxis eines komparatistischen Grenzgebietes/herausgegeben, ed. E. Schmidt (Berlin: Verlag, 1992), 279-97: Frieder Busch, ‘Katherine Mansfield and Literary Impressionism in France and Germany’, Arcadia, 5, (1970): 58-76.

For texts in English dealing with the concept of Literary Impressionism see M. E. Kronegger, Literary Impressionism (New Haven: College and University Press, 1973); M. E. Kronegger, ‘The Multiplication of the Self from Flaubert to Sartre’ in L’ Esprit Créateur, Vol. 13: 4, (Winter 1973): 311-19; Jesse Matz, Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Matz completely ignored Mansfield within the context of Literary Impressionism and made modernists Conrad, Joyce, Woolf and Proust the focus of his investigations.

Ferdinand Brunetière ‘L’Impressionnisme dans le roman’, La Revue des deux monde, 15 Nov. 1879, 452. The article was written in response to Alphonse Daudet’s Les Rois en exil/Kings in Exile (1879): ‘une transposition systematique des moyens d’expression d’un art, qui est l’art de peindre, dans le domaine d’un autre art, qui est l’art d’écrire.’ Translation into English: M. C. Reimer.

M. E. Kronegger, Literary Impressionism, 13.

J. Theodore Johnson Jr., ‘Literary Impressionism in France: A Survey of Criticism’, L’Esprit Créateur, Vol. 13:4, (Winter 1973): 271.

Van Gunsteren, 16.

Fullbrook, 64.

Van Gunsteren, 11.

Key Impressionist texts include: Belinda Thomson, Impressionism: Origins, Practice, Reception (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000); John Rewald, The History of Impressionism (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961); Phoebe Pool, Impressionism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1967): and T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984).

KM to Dorothy Brett, 29 August 1921, The Collected Letters, 4:270.

Manet is the exception; see, for example, The Execution of Emperor Maxmilian (1868-69), but dated 19 June 1867.

Mansfield described her stories as ‘slices of life’ in a conversation with A. R. Orage (1873-1934), editor of The New Age, an English modernist journal to which Mansfield contributed intermittently from 1910 A. R. Orage, Century, November 1924, 3: ATL MS papers 3985, Folder 05, Andrew Bell.

Katherine Mansfield, ‘Daphne’ in The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield (London: Penguin, 1981), 461. This is the edition to which I will continue to refer throughout this essay.

Ibid.; San Toy, or The Emperors Own is a ‘Chinese’ musical comedy in two acts. It was originally performed at Daly’s Theatre in London on 21 October 1899 and ran for 768 performances. However, J. C. Williamson’s Dunedin-based Musical Comedy Company performed the play in Wellington in November 1902 and it is most likely that Mansfield attended. See the advertisement for the show: Evening Post, Volume LXIV, Issue 125, 22 November 1902, 4. The Otago Witness, Issue 2544, 17 December 1902, 38, has a photograph of the Members of J. C. Williamson’s Company and a short note regarding the tour.

This is according to Mansfield’s brother-in-law, Richard Murry, born Arthur Murry (1903-?), recounted in an interview with Moira Taylor: ‘It’ll be all right, It’ll be all right’, published in the New Zealand Listener (11 May 1974) 18-19; Alexander

23

24

Turnbull Library, fms-Papers-6984-6.

16 ‘Daphne’, 462.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid. Mansfield is referring to the Pre-Raphaelite works and to the allegorical painting, Hope (1885) by George Frederick Watts (1817-1904) which she saw at the Tate upon her arrival in London in 1903 and which represented her first experience of international modern art.

19 Ibid.

20 For a review of the exhibition see The Times, London, 17 January 1905, Issue 37606, 6, col. A. 21 Bendall received lessons from Frances Hodgkins (1869-1947) whose Impressionist tendencies have been noted by Pamela Gerrish Nunn in ‘Frances Hodgkins and Impressionism’ in Hodgkins 97: papers held at the University of Otago, 4-6 April 1997, to mark the 50th anniversary of Frances Hodgkins’s death, ed. R.D.J. Collins (Dunedin: Hocken Library in association with Research Centre for New Zealand Studies, University of Otago, 1998).

22 Evening Post, 12 October 1907, Volume LXXIV, Issue 90, 9.

23 Evening Post, 28 February 1908, Volume LXXV, Issue 50, 3.

24 KM to Dorothy Brett, 5 December 1921, The Collected Letters 4:333. Mansfield’s ‘sea captain’ is most likely van Gogh’s Le Postier, Joseph Roulin (1889) which was exhibited at that show.

25 Both D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), English writer, painter and critic and J. D. Ferguson (1874-1961), Scottish painter, experimented with the Post-Impressionist style in painting. Rhythm was initially published as a quarterly with four issues in 1911, seven in 1912 and three in 1913. It was then re-launched as The Blue Review and a further three issues were published.

26 Published in The Native Companion, 2 December 1907.

27 Mansfield in ed. Margaret Scott, The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks (Wellington: Lincoln University Press, 1997), Vol 1, 17071. I have chosen to work from the earlier draft text as it is the fuller version of the two.

28 For example, Monet: The Quai du Louvre (1867), Monet: Rue Montorgueil (1878), Monet: Boulevard des Capucines (1873) also shown at the Grafton Galleries, London in 1905, along with Pissarro’s The Place du Théâtre Français (1898).

29 ‘The Garden Party’, 254.

30 Mansfield recorded in her notebook: ‘Everywhere on the hills great masses of charred logs – looking for all the world like strange fantastic beasts’, Notebooks 1:136. The Urewera region is in New Zealand’s North Island.

31 Notebooks, 1:170.

32 Weisstein, 287.

33 Notebooks, 1:171.

34 Ibid.

35 Again I have chosen to work from the original draft; see Notebooks 1:172.

36 For example, ‘The Little Governess’.

37 Fullbrook, 8.

38 Also Reginald Peacock and his wife; the couple in The Man without a Temperament and A Dill Pickle respectively, and Archie and Rupert in Honesty.

39 ‘Prelude’, 57-59.

40 Other examples include: Cassatt’s Mother and Child (c.1905) and The Oval Mirror (1901); and Morisot’s The Cheval Glass (1876).

41 Berthe Morisot in ed. Denis Rouart, The Correspondence of Berthe Morisot (London: Camden, 1986), 95.

42 Anne Higonet, Berthe Morisot (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), xii.

43 ‘Prelude’, 11.

44 ‘At the Bay’, 222-3 45 The ambivalence which informs Morisot’s paintings of women and children, specifically where they are depicted as detached from their dependants was being played out in her work from the time of Edma’s marriage in 1869 and her subsequent confinement. Prior to this, Morisot produced landscapes and semi-rural scenes – many unpeopled; for example, Thatched Cottage in Normandy (1865) and The Seine below the Pont d’Iéna (1866). Following Edma’s marriage and then her own in 1874, Morisot painted more of the works which came to characterise her oeuvre – the domestic scenes – which address the place and condition of women. Such images include Mme Morisot and Her Daughter Mme Pontillon (The Mother and Sister of the Artist) (1869-70); Mme Pontillon and Her Daughter, Jeanne (1871): and Mme Gobillard and Her Daughter, Paule (1871). These are all images of family members and, therefore, represent an intimate understanding of women’s rites of passage.

46 Notebooks, 1:67 47 ‘At the Bay’, 222.