Cinema and the Imagination in Katherine Mansfield's Writing

M. Ascari

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137400352
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137400369
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Using silent cinema as a critical lens enables us to reassess Katherine Mansfield's entire literary career. Starting from the awareness that innovation in literature is often the outcome of hybridisation, this book discusses not only a single case study, but also the intermedia exchanges in which literary modernism at large is rooted.

1

Mansfield, Silent Film and Post-Impressionism

Abstract: In the 1910s Mansfield repeatedly went to the pictures. As her writings show, she was intrigued by both films and audiences, and she perceived an analogy between films, dreams and other mental processes. To understand the development of Mansfield’s cinematic imagination, the chapter focuses on her youthful interest for Walter Pater’s The Child in the House, which opens with a cinematic dream that is conducive to self-analysis. After exploring Pater’s neo-Platonic interest for the theatre of the mind, which resulted in his theory of the stream of consciousness, the chapter discusses Post-Impressionist interart aesthetics, focusing on its indifference to cinema. As rooted in photography, cinema was too realistic and mechanical to inspire avant-garde artists, but Mansfield was daring enough to grasp its liberating potential.

Mansfield, Katherine. Cinema and the Imagination in Katherine Mansfield’s Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137400369.0004.

Mansfield goes to the pictures

In her excellent essay, which has provided my research with a solid foundation, Sarah Sandley suggests that Mansfield developed an interest for films while in London in 1911, although the first reference to her picture-going is included in a letter from Murry dated March 1912.¹ According to Sandley, however, it was only in 1915 that ‘filmic techniques’² began to mark Mansfield’s fiction and this hypothesis is supported by the many references to cinema we find in her private writings dating from this period.

On 7 January 1915 Mansfield wrote in her Notebooks: ‘A wet day. Saw a cinema in the afternoon’,³ while 19 January has a more valuable revelation in store: ‘Got on slowly with Cinema, but badly. Sat on the divan & saw rather than wrote. Still it all was better.’ ⁴ This proves not only that Mansfield had started to write a story entitled ‘Cinema’, which has apparently not survived, but also that her writing was rooted in her visual imagination, as shown by the expression ‘saw rather than wrote’. A parallel can be drawn between this visionary or cinematic stage in the creative process and the act of dreaming, which was likewise at the origin of Mansfield’s inspiration: ‘I dreamed a short story last night even down to its name, which was Sun & Moon. […] I didn’t dream that I read it. No I was in it part of it and it played round invisible me.’ ⁵ I wish to underline the peculiar character of this cinematic gaze, which enabled Mansfield to do away with the Impressionist/naturalist principle of an embodied observer whose point of view is limited, developing new and more flexible representational techniques, as we shall see when we discuss her fiction.

The cinematic character of dreams was underlined by various modernists. While H. D. described film as ‘the art of dream portrayal’,⁶ Wyndham Lewis described dreams as silent films, contrasting their visionary nature with the prosaic functions the sense of sight acquires in daily life:

The eye has to pay, emotionally, for its practical empire over our lives.

In dreams, however, the eye is in every way supreme. Our dreams are so muffled […] that they are nearly as silent as the silent film. There the mind, by arranging things as it requires them for its own delight or horror, can get the full emotional shock, the purely visionary quality that early in life becomes dissociated from our exercise of the visual sense.⁷

The visual and visionary qualities of Mansfield’s own inspiration transpire from a moving passage written after the death of her brother, relating

her attempt to write a story based on her New Zealand memories: ‘It is with you that I see & that is why I see so clearly.’ ⁸ As these words clarify, Mansfield not only associated the creative power of the imagination with the act of seeing, but this inner sight or insight acquired a sort of preternatural character for her, since her writing was rooted in the depths of her psyche, where the emotions are more intense.

We should not forget, however, that Mansfield was fascinated also by a different perspective – the gaze she directed towards the audience. This dimension marks Mansfield’s accounts of both her theatre-going and cinema-going. Already in October 1912, Rhythm had published ‘Jack and Jill Attend the Theatre’, an ironically meta-theatrical dialogue in which two spectators, a man and a woman, discuss a play while it is being staged. This eccentric review of J.M. Synge’s The Well of the Saints is signed ‘The Two Tigers’, which in-vites us to identify Jack as Murry and Jill as Mansfield. What this experimental text records are not only the voices of the two protagonists, but also that of the programme girl and the laughter of the audience, while no words from the play itself are reported. Right from the beginning, the attention of the protagonists is focused on the spectators. What happens onstage is occasionally described, but this sketchy account of a boring play becomes a pretext to discuss theatre as a collective ritual.

A Journal entry dated 6 January 1915 – again relating a theatrical experience – interestingly testifies both to Mansfield’s keen appetite for observation and to her desire to experiment with new forms of writing:

Went to Hippodrome. The audience – their heads & hands – were the only thing worth watching. In the gloom they seem so remote, so infallible in movement. Went to Pantomime. Very interesting. Began to think of Panto tradition. Would like to write in it.⁹

A similar fascination with the spectators rather than with the spectacle arises from an entry dated 27 January: ‘Met a woman who’d been in the cinema with me – her old yellow teeth & pink roses in her hat & […] lovely eyes & battered hair. I shall not forget her – no no. She was wonderful.’ ¹⁰

Far from being peculiar to Mansfield, this double gaze, which is directed both at the stage/screen and at the audience, marks also H. D.’ s and Dorothy Richardson’s accounts of their cinema-going, in which ‘spectacles and spectatorship are intertwined’.¹¹ Working on these women modernists’ response to cinema in the 1920s, Laura Marcus discusses another phenomenon that we find already in Mansfield’s writings, that is to say the permeability between the experience of film-viewing and ‘vision as a form of film-making’.¹² This is evidenced in a letter Mansfield wrote from Paris in May 1915 and in which cinema plays a prominent part, finally tinging the writer’s perception of reality:

Instead of having dinner today I ate some bread & drank some wine at home and went to a cinéma. It was almost too good. A detective drama, so well acted and so sharp and cruel with a horrible décor – the environs of Calais. Wickedness triumphed to everyone’s great relief, for the hero, an apache called L’Fantôme was an admirable actor. And there was a girl there, mistress of ‘Bébé’ and ‘le faux curé,’ two other apaches. I wish you could have seen that girl act. She was very still and then her gestures sprang from her. Pale, you know. A little round head and a black dress. All the while the orchestra played a tango that we have heard before, a very ‘troubling’ tune.¹³

This film can be identified as Le Faux Magistrat (1914), one of the five titles in the Fantomas series directed by Louis Feuillade. The first of the five episodes which make up Le Faux Magistrat is actually set in Saint-Calais. It revolves around the theft of some jewels which is made possible by Rosa, a servant in the Château des Loges and the mistress of Paulet, also called Bébé, one of the ‘apaches’ –as Paris street criminals were called, due to their savagery – in Fantomas’s gang. The apache who carries out the theft is dressed as a priest, hence the ‘faux curé’.¹⁴

Mansfield’s comments show her enthusiasm for films as a popular form of entertainment and include revealing references both to silent film acting and to its musical accompaniment. Moreover, her description of the ‘detective drama’ she saw at the cinema is interestingly followed by the description o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Mansfield, Silent Film and Post-Impressionism
• 2  Beyond Impressionist Subjectivity
• 3  Ideological Stances and Aesthetic Concerns
• 4  Mansfields Post-War Reappraisal of Cinema
• 5  Sensory Deprivation and Inner Probing
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index