Shelley Mansfield Final Essay PLAN PDF

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Plan for my final comparative essay between Shelley and Mansfield....

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Romanticism to Modernism and Literature and Critical Thought FINAL ASSESSMENT PLAN

The Female Gothic and the haunting of the domestic space in Mary Shelley’s ‘Matilda’ (1820) and Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Daughters of The Late Colonel’ (1920). Both Mary Shelley’s 1820 novella Matilda and Katherine Mansfield’s 1920 short story The Daughters of the Late Colonel follow daughters attempting to navigate the domestic space following the deaths of their father. Whilst neither of these texts feature literal hauntings by spectral figures, this essay will argue that both Matilda’s remote cottage and Constantia and Josephine’s middle class home are haunted by the patriarchal authority of their dead fathers. Both of these texts can therefore be considered to depict the haunted house, arguably one of the most recognisable motifs of the gothic genre. Although it has been written that “the Gothic seems to have died out around 1820” 1, the year Matilda was written, Gothic themes and motifs persist in literature to the present day. This has been particularly associated with women, for example Laoaur outlines how “women writers adapt Gothic tropes to engage with their own and their age’s anxieties”2 across time periods. The concept of the ‘Female Gothic’ was first coined by Ellen Moers in her 1976 book Literary Women: The Great Writers, in which she defines the ‘Female Gothic’ as simply “the work that women writers have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the Gothic”. 3 Moers goes on to describe how female gothic texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, particularly Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, encoded women’s anxieties regarding topics such as childbirth, motherhood and entrapment. This concept has been built upon by critics such as Anne Besnault-Levita who describes how the concept of the female gothic has developed from simply referring to work produced by women in the gothic period to encompass a wide range of different texts and academic criticism4.

1 Hansen, Jim. ‘A Nightmare on the Brain: Gothic Suspicion and Literary Modernism’ in Literature Compass, volume 8, issue 9, November 2011. (Wiley Online Library, 2011). Pp 635.

2 Laouar, Nihad. ‘Ghosts Within Us’: A Study of Women Writers of Gothic Modernism. PHD Thesis. (Canterbury Christ Church University, 2019). Pp 1. 3 Moers, Ellen, ‘Female Gothic’ in Literary Women: The Great Writers (New York: Doubleday, 1976), pp. 90. 4 Besnault-Levita, Anne. ‘Mirrors of the Self and the Tradition of the “Female Gothic”: Scenes of Hauntings and Apparitions in Victorian and Modernist Short Fiction’ in Journal of the Short Story in English, issue 70, spring 2018. Pp. 23-40.

It has also been argued that “the connections between modernism and the Gothic have been largely overlooked in studies of the Gothic in modern scholarship” 5. Nihad Laouar outlines how “the ostensible archaic mode of the Gothic that Modernism endeavoured to throw away returns from the repressed to haunt Modernist fiction”6. Taryn Louise Norman also identifies a “Gothic Modernism”, which she defines as “a strain of Modernism that makes use of the wellestablished language and conventions of the Gothic terms in order to express recognizably Modernist concerns about the nature of subjectivity, temporality, language, and knowledge.”7 This essay will examine Katherine Mansfield’s 1920 short story Daughters of the Late Colonel as an example of this ‘Gothic Modernism’ to explore how conventions of the Female Gothic materialise in the modernist context.

Critics have outlined that, in Daughters of the Late Colonel, Mansfield works “characteristically through suggestion rather than explicit development to illuminate a late-Victorian world, with the subdued elegiac sense of female lives wasted in the service of an outmoded patriarchal order”8. The references to haunting, therefore, are more subtle than may be expected of the Gothic.

Miller argues that although the female gothic is difficult to define, in Matilda “Shelley masterfully deploys the elements typically attributed to the genre”9. Mansfield’s place in this tradition is less obvious, however… Shelley’s “lone cottage on a solitary, wide heath” where “no voice of life reaches me”10 is typically Gothic. The description of the house on the first page of the novella describes its isolation and desolation at length. This initial description of the house is coloured by the narrator’s “strange state of mind” and

5 Smith, Andrew and Wallace, Jeff. ‘Introduction: Gothic Modernisms: History, Culture and Aesthetics’ in Gothic Modernisms. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001) Pp 1. 6 Laouar, N. ‘Ghosts Within Us’: A Study of Women Writers of Gothic Modernism. Canterbury Christ Church University, 2019. PhD thesis. Pp 1. 7 Norman, Taryn Louise. Gothic Modernism: Revising and Representing the Narratives of History and Romance. 2012. University of Tennessee. PhD thesis. Pp v. 8 ‘Katherine Mansfield’ in The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twentieth and Twenty First Centuries, volume 10, ed. Jahan Ramazani. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2018) Pp 697. 9 Miller, Kathleen A. ‘"The Remembrance Haunts Me like a Crime": Narrative Control, the Dramatic, and the Female Gothic in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's "Mathilda"’ in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Volume. 27, Number 2 (Tulsa: University of Tulsa, 2008) pp. 291. 10 Shelley, Matilda, pg 1.

knowledge of her impending death11 , it could be said that the house is haunted not only by the past but also by the future, by the ghost that Matilda will become after the story is told. “Perhaps a history such as mine had better die with me”12 “A sacred horror in my tale which was unfit for utterance”13

Other critics have also linked Mansfield to this tradition of the female gothic. Besnault-Levita writes that in the short story The Little Governess “Mansfield is obviously playing here less with Gothic clichés than she is revisiting Gothic scenarios transposed into the modern world” to revisit “female conflicts between passivity and control, repression and self-expression, confusion and order”14. The same can be said for Daughters of the Late Colonel. In her original essay on the Female Gothic, Moers defines the Gothic as writing “with one definite auctorial intent: to scare”15. Daughters of the Late Colonel fulfils this definition of the Gothic because the text is saturated by the sisters’ fear of their dead father, a fear which is arguably then experienced by the audience.

Furthermore, the use of domestic space arguably makes the haunted house a trope inherently linked to the Female Gothic. Jim Hansen has described the gothic as “a genre obsessed with tales of female confinement”16

Emily McCann highlights the importance of space and domesticity in the Gothic, describing it as “the genre that first critiqued British ideologies of gendered public and private spheres, invoking a history of

11 Shelley, Matilda, pg 1. 12 Shelley, Matilda, pg 1. 13 Shelley, Matilda, pg 2. 14 Besnault-Levita, ‘Mirrors of the Self’, pp 38. 15 Moers, ‘Female Gothic’, pp 90. 16 Hansen, A Nightmare on the Brain, pp 637.

women's marginalization from civic lives”17

The use of the haunted house trope in modernist writing has been highlighted by Emma Liggins, who writes that “Modernist women writers refashioned the haunted house setting of the Victorian ghost story in order to address the unsettling allure of the past and fears about an increasingly mechanised future” 18

The influence of their dead father over Constantia and Josephine in Daughters of the Late Colonel is evident from the very beginning of the story, as Constantia asks “do you think father would mind if we gave his top-hat to the porter?”19. This question is never answered - Josephine states that “we can decide tomorrow” and it is never mentioned again20

Matilda’s father’s change in behaviour is triggered by the arrival of a potential suitor - “a young man of rank”21 who takes interest in Matilda. “Alas! I now met frowns where before I had been welcomed only with smiles: he, my beloved father, shunned me, and either treated me with harshness or a more heartbreaking coldness”22

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“But when I saw you become the object of another’s love [...] then the fiend awoke within me” 23

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Just as this relationship is ended by the father, Matilda’s potential relationship with the young poet Woodrow is ended by Matilda’s remembrance of her fathers crimes.

“Oh, my beloved father! Indeed you made me miserable beyond all words, but how truly did I forgive you, and how entirely did you possess my whole heart.”24

Feminist potential

17 McCann, Emily. Gothic Futures: Modernist Gothic, Women’s Modernism. 2014. University of Florida. PhD Thesis. Pp 7. 18 Liggins, Emma. ‘Beyond the Haunted House? Modernist Women’s Ghost Stories and the Troubling of Modernity’ in British Women Short Story Writers: The New Woman To Now, edited by Emma Young and James Bailey. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). Pp 32. 19 Mansfield, Katherine. ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’ in The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twenty and Twenty-first Centuries, 10th edition, ed. Jahan Ramazani. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2018). Pp. 698. 20 Mansfield, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, pp 698. 21 Shelley, Matilda, pp 25. 22 Shelley, Matilda, pp 25. 23 Shelley, Matilda, pp 53. 24 Shelley, Matilda, pp 28.

Critics have debated the ‘feminist potential’ of the female gothic, with some arguing that the conventional narrative of female entrapment reinforces stereotypes of women as passive victims. In both of these stories the women attempt to escape from patriarchal control but are unsuccessful. Whilst Shelley’s eponymous heroine flees the traditional domestic space to live as a recluse in a remote cottage, she is still tormented by thoughts of her father and is unable to live in peace.

Matilda reflects on her experiences before her death

Similarly, whilst the sisters of Daughters of the late Colonel no longer have to answer to a patriarchal figure, they remain paralysed by indecision and afraid that their father would not approve of their choices. The influence of their dead father over Constantia and Josephine in Daughters of the Late Colonel is evident from the very beginning of the story, as Constantia asks “do you think father would mind if we gave his top-hat to the porter?”25. This question is never answered - Josephine states that “we can decide tomorrow” and it is never mentioned again26.

The sisters appear to be infantilised to the point that they no longer have control or agency over their own bodies - “‘I don’t think I am’ said Constantia. She closed her eyes to make sure. She was.”27

Their reaction to running out of butter - “‘oh what a bother’ said Josephine. She bit her lip. ‘What had we better do?’. Constantia looked dubious. ‘We can’t disturb Kate again’ she said softly [...] Josephine frowned heavily, concentrated”28. Small inconveniences become overblown - “would they have to wait....in torture?”29, picking out a coffin to suit their father is enough to make Josephine “very nervous”.

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“‘Why?’ snapped Josephine, feeling, as usual, much better now that she knew for certain that Constantia was terrified. ‘It’s got to be done. But I do wish you wouldn’t whisper, Con.’” 30

“Neither of them could really believe that father was never coming back. Josephine had had a moment of

25 Mansfield, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, pp 698. 26 Mansfield, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, pp 698. 27 Mansfield, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, pp 699. 28 Mansfield, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, pp 700. 29 Mansfield, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, pp 701. 30 Mansfield, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, pp 703.

absolute terror at the ceremony while the coffin was lowered, to think that she and Constantia had done this thing without asking his permission. What would father say when he found out? For he was bound to find out sooner or later. He always did.”31

This is reiterated in the present, drawing a link between the present moment and the flashback to the father’s funeral - “father would never forgive them. That was what they felt more than ever when, two mornings later, they went into his room to go through his things [...] it was dark in the hall. It had been a rule for years to never disturb father in the morning, whatever happened. And now they were going to open the door without knocking even....Constantia’s eyes were enormous at the idea, Josephine felt weak in the knees.”32 Infantilization - “‘No Jug, that’s not fair. You’re the eldest”33

The sense of the house in Daughters of the Late Colonel being haunted is something…. “Josephine could only glare. She had the most extraordinary feeling that she had just escaped something simply awful. But how could she explain to Constantia that father was in the chest of drawers? He was in the top drawer with his handkerchiefs and neckties, or in the next with his shirts and pyjamas, or in the lowest of all with his suits. He was watching there, hidden away - just behind the door handle - ready to spring”34

Miller proposes a “reconsideration of the female gothic's feminist potential” 35 by highlighting Matilda’s role as a “powerful actress”36, arguing against previous ideas that the female gothic perpetuates the perception of women as powerless victims. In contrast to Constantia and Joesphine’s complete paralysis in the face of basic household tasks, Matilda has the agency to successfully fake her own death, run away, and live alone for several years.

31 Mansfield, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, pp 702. 32 Mansfield, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, pp 702. 33 Mansfield, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, pp 702. 34 Mansfield, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, pp 703. 35 Miller, ‘The Remembrance…’, pp 292. 36 Miller, ‘The Remembrance…’, pp 292.

Mansfield offers a distinctly gothic image in the flashback to the late Colonel’s death - “Oh, far from it! He lay there, purple, a dark, angry purple in the face, and never even looked at them when they came in. Then, as they were standing there, wondering what to do, he had suddenly opened one eye. Oh, what a difference it would have made, what a difference in their memory of him, how much easier to tell people about it, if he had opened both! But no - one eye only. It glared at them a moment and then...went out” 37. In the present, when the sisters talk to Mr Farolles about their father’s death, it is the image of the eye that resurfaces - “both of them felt certain that eye wasn’t at all a peaceful eye”38

Moves away from Patriarchy - Daughters of the Late Colonel

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“And then she did one of those amazingly bold things that she’d done about twice before in their lives: she marched over to the wardrobe, turned the key, and took it out of the lock [..] she’d risked deliberately father being in there amongst his overcoats”39

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“She even thought for a moment of hiding the watch in a narrow cardboard corset-box that she’d kept by her for a long time”40

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Goes back in the question about the fish - “Fried or boiled? Josephine and Constantia were quite bewildered for the moment. They could hardly take it in.”41

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“‘You come, Jug, and decide. I really can’t. It’s too difficult.’ But after a pause and a long glare Josephine would sigh. ‘Now you’ve put the doubt into my mind, Con, I’m sure I can’t tell myself’. ‘Well, we can’t postpone it again,’ said Josephine. ‘If we postpone it this time-’”42

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The organ appears to shake the sisters out of their father’s authority - “never would sound that lound, strange bellow when father thought they were not hurrying enough” - finally accepting that their father is gone, the sun comes out directly after this

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“She had always felt there was...something”43

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Begins to question alternative ways of going about their lives - “if mother had lived, might they

37 Mansfield, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, pp 701. 38 Mansfield, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, pp 701. 39 Mansfield, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, pp 703. 40 Mansfield, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, pp 705. 41 Mansfield, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, pp 707. 42 Mansfield, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, pp 709. 43 Mansfield, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, pp 710.

have been married? [...] the rest had been looking after father and keeping out of father’s way. But now? But now?”44 ●

Failure of epiphany - “I’ve forgotten too.”

Like Mansfield, Shelley also reflects on women’s inabilities to articulate their experiences under patriarchy. Although Matilda’s status as the narrator and supposed author of the text affords her some kind of power, she remains unable to fully put her experience into words.

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“There was a sacred horror in my tale which rendered it unfit for utterance”45

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“What am I writing? I must collect my thoughts”46

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“In life I dared not, in death I unveil the mystery”47

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“But I forget myself, my tale is as yet untold. I will pause for a few moments.”48

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“I seem perhaps to have dashed too suddenly into the description, but thus suddenly did it happen”49

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Overwhelmed by emotions - “But I wonder from my relation - let woe come at it’s appointed

time”50 ●

Recounting Woodville’s words - “I repeat his persuasions in faint terms and cannot give you at the same time the tone and gesture that animated them”51

Shelley writes of Matilda’s mother that “although she was older than he by nearly two years the nature of her education made her more childish” 52. Women infantilized by patriarchy, reference to Mary Wollstoncraft?. Matilda herself is allowed and even encouraged to study, in London she is “led by my father to attend to deeper studies”53

44 Mansfield, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, pp 710. 45 Shelley, Matilda, pp 2. 46 Shelley, Matilda, pp 2. 47 Shelley, Matilda, pp 2. 48 Shelley, Matilda, pp 3. 49 Shelley, Matilda, pp 28. 50 Shelley, Matilda, pp 22. 51 Shelley, Matilda, pp 88. 52 Shelley, Matilda, pp 6. 53 Shelley, Matilda, pp 23.

Also a matriarchal haunting? - Matilda’s father writes of her dead mother “while in that unhappy island, where everything breathes her spirit that I have lost forever, a spell held me”54

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Trying to replace the mother with Matilda - “‘When I was last here your mother read Dante to me; you shall go on where she left off”55

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“Diana died to give her birth; her mother’s spirit was transferred into her frame, and she ought to be as Diana to me.”56

Matilda’s connection to nature (and to the feminine?) - typical gothic trope, also something that the sisters in DOLC seem to be completely lacking - a complete escape from the domestic space

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“I believe that I bore an individual attachment to every tree in our park”57

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“My pleasures arose from the contemplation of nature alone, I had no companion”58

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“You appeared as the deity of a lovely region [...] you seemed to have gained a grace from the mountain breezes - the waterfalls and the lake [...] nymph of the woods”59

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“The child of the woods, the nursling of Nature’s bright self”60

Lack of the father associated with death - a kind of spiritual death?

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“And now I began to live. All around me was transformed from a dull uniformity to the brightest scene of joy and delight”61...