Katherine Mansfield as Literary Fauvist - Tom Holmes
The Opiate, Fall Vol. 3
CRITICISM
Katherine Mansfield as Literary Fauvist Tom Holmes
F
rom 1912 to 1913, Katherine Mansfield served as one of the editors of Rhythm, a modernist literary and arts journal. During her time there, she interacted with and was influenced by the Fauvists, a group of painters that experimented “with colour and pictorial space” (Welton 370). Some of the better known Fauvists are Henri Matisse, Andre Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck and Anne Estelle Rice. The movement peaked “between 1905 and 1907” (370), but it may have begun around 1900 after the Exposition Universelle opened in Paris. Despite when it arrived, it arrived, and Jude Welton, in her “Fauvism” entry in Art: The Whole Story, gives a concise description of Fauvism when she notes, “Matisse and Derain did not use colour to imitate nature;
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they used it imaginatively to create both harmonies and disharmonies. Rejecting the convention of painting a realistic illusion of space, they instead emphasized the flat surface of the canvas” (371). By using this Fauvist lens to read Mansfield’s stories, new insights can be found, such as the effectiveness of decentralized narrators and time, and especially the Fauvist use of foreground and background and how Mansfield uses them to juxtapose sorrow and joy. In the first issue of Rhythm, Michael T. H. Sadler in “Fauvism and a Fauve” says, “Fauves are striving [for] decentralization of design” (17). Mansfield, also, does this when her stories shift in and out of the minds of different characters or when one character, such as Raoul Duquette
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