To lose myself in the soul of the other that I am not: The process of becoming in Katherine Mansfield’s short stories

Abstract

The history of the critical reception of the short fiction of the writer Katherine Mansfield can be divided into two main areas: studies that investigate her short stories in their multiple relationships with Modernism, and more recent analyses that focus on her (post)colonial roots as a New Zealander. The cultural, gendered and physical otherness in her short stories is the privileged subject of criticism. Conversely, what is almost completely forgotten by the critics is her concern for the nonhuman world. What is most striking is how the otherness that ontologically characterises her life and her stories is not only a line of separation but also traces a link between different worlds. The elements of the binary paradigms are always in relation to each other and they exist only through this relation. Seen from this perspective, her short stories show the links and pave the way not to separation but to unity. This essay aims to highlight the relevance that the act of writing has for Mansfield in her attempt to create a new subjectivity that embeds human and nonhuman in a process of autopoiesis. Instead of seeing the world and its inhabitants in terms of static structures, she focuses on the network of relationships between them. It is in her network of relationships that she depicts what can be seen as her posthumanism ante litteram.