Katherine Mansfield: Stories in Music
Katherine Mansfield: Stories in Music, lecture by Claire Davison, 6 February 2021
Guest Blog: Lisa Hutchins
We may know Katherine Mansfield as a talented writer of short stories and a correspondent of Virginia Woolf who challenged that writer to produce some of her own best work. In fact, she was also a talented musician who considered a professional career in that discipline before settling on her first creative love, writing.
However, her musical sensibility continued to inform her creative work for the whole of her life. In the latest Literature Cambridge online study session Claire Davison, Professor of Modernist Literature at Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris, offered a series of highly original and thought-provoking insights on Mansfield's musical sensibility and its evidence throughout her work.
Claire had previously lectured on Mansfield for the Literature Cambridge course on women writers in 2018. You can read her blog post here.
For this session, after reviewing Mansfield's life and career and identifying what she called an almost pathological unrootedness partly caused by ill-health, Claire described three specific qualities of Mansfield's stories relating to music. Some stories are built around musical performances. Others use musical forms or poetics. A third category uses phrasing or rhythm in a particularly dense and evocative way to add meaning and texture to what might be a relatively short text.
Claire examined three stories to illustrate how these categories can be applied. The Wind Blows is centred on a music lesson that mentions specific pieces, including Sea Pieces by the American composer Edward MacDowell (which includes From a Wandering Iceberg, referred to in the text) and also Beethoven. Claire told us that, using the details of the minor second movement and the allegretto third movement, this can be identified as Sonata 32 no. 2, Der Sturm (The Tempest). The opening section is tempestuous indeed, full of agitation while the middle section, as the lesson takes place, starts with tears, sobs and passion and then subsides into quiet. Movement three perfectly accompanies the end with its sudden disconnection as the story becomes a flashback and, like the music, falls into silence.
Next we looked at The Daughters of the Late Colonel which shows two elderly, unmarried sisters in the days and weeks after their father's death. We have the distinct sense that the father was tyrannical and demanding and that their lives have revolved around securing his comfort and avoiding his disapproval. In this story raucous music that would have infuriated the old man intrudes from a barrel organ in the street outside. We were reminded that life would have been immensely precarious for these two elderly women, now left outside the world of the Victorian patriarchy and utterly ill-prepared for life, possibly with no financial means either. Claire told us that, like her contemporaries, Mansfield includes musical phrases and fragments in her work to arrive at what is known as the modernist epiphany. Here modernity is ushered in by the music offering ‘a perfect fountain of bubbling notes’ outside the window. Claire said this seems to usher in a new chapter of light, warmth, colour and laughter that leaves the reader with hope for the sisters' future.
Claire went on to demonstrate how The Singing Lesson interweaves music and stories inspired by music within a musical structure. At the beginning the reader is plunged into the soundscape of a girls' school through the use of broken-off words, the placement of adverbs and through punctuation that seems to mark time. We learned how the notion of performance is embedded in the structure of the tale as Miss Meadows takes to the stage with her baton and music stand. Claire mentioned when discussing The Wind Blows, that Mansfield used music in the service of the story rather than necessarily portraying it with complete fidelity, and now she told us this is a song to which a tune can be matched – Herbstlied by Mendelssohn. With two parts for female voices, it was popular in girls' schools at this time, but was not intended to be sung as a lament. We saw how the story contains a dense collection of allusions and references, including a humorous portrayal of a school, a caustic satire on musical performance misused, and the use of a harsh, militaristic undertone (the baton, Miss Meadows' march to the stage and sharp execution of a turn before the brass music stand, a telegram bringing news of a death) to refer to the tyranny of young men losing their lives in the Great War. These had included Mansfield's own brother.
Claire finished her talk with a lovely discussion of Mansfield's poem, Night-Scented Stock which she described as having a musical soundscape extending well beyond the constraints of the printed text. Music runs through it, including the rhythms of a dance and the notes of a flute. We learned it was sent to Bloomsbury stalwart Ottoline Morrell at her home, Garsington Manor, after a party there. This too has political significance as the Morrells were outspoken pacifists who offered Garsington as a refuge for conscientious objectors and shell-shocked soldiers. We heard how the setting, tone, rhythm and metre are entirely transfigured once the music starts within the text, and how the reader must follow the words as they follow the rhythm of music. The enchanted scene returns to normal as suddenly as the music stops and Claire invited us to consider that Mansfield's achievement was nothing less than the transmutation of one artistic form into something entirely different.
Claire will present another session for the Literature Cambridge Virginia Woolf season on Saturday 8 May, discussing Three Guineas and music. She will consider the text from a literary perspective; no special musical knowledge is required.
• The next online study session is Dickens, Bleak House with Corinna Russell, Saturday 20 February at 6pm UK time. And our Woolf Season continues with To the Lighthouse on 13 and 14 February.
