Economic Women: Money and (Im)mobility in Selected Stories by Katherine Mansfield

Regenia Gagnier’s comment that late Victorian literature ‘represents the everyday economic life between the genders’ as ‘refracted through the discourses of technology, machinery and economic operations’ applies equally to modernist writing of the early twentieth century, especially before England’s social structure was ruptured by the devastation of the Great War.1 In Katherine Mansfield’s stories the effects of modernity in the forms of ‘economic events that shaped the contemporary world’,2 then, are crucial touchstones for the changing subjectivities and self–other relations of her characters. To read her work through an economic lens informed by twenty-first-century consumer discourses and the ideology of global capitalism is to become aware of the marketplace as a powerful, animating force that intersects with and destabilizes her characters in unpredictable ways, shaping her modernist response to money conceived as the basis of economic and social power.