Katherine Mansfield and Empire

As modernity, and by implication modernism, is increasingly interpreted as a global and transnational phenomenon, functioning through multiple interactions across social and geographical locations, and as empire is likewise often perceived as globally constituted, part of a world system, Mansfield’s dual affiliations to her New Zealand society of origin and the European world where she pursued her art have come under new scrutiny. This chapter draws on these expanded critical frameworks, seeing Mansfield as a colonial-metropolitan writer, who masked her colonial ‘otherness’ as British to enable an anonymous multi-positionality. It argues that her satire of German imperial values in stories published in In a German Pension (1911) belies an interior subjective space in which she cultivated in her art a colonial counter-imaginary focused on issues of gender and women’s place. Her chiastic crossover between imperial and colonial sensibilities, and enfolding and overlapping of their different geographies and temporalities, informs a reading of two early New Zealand ‘outback’ stories of savagery, “The Woman at the Store“ (1912) and “Millie“ (1913). Gaps and silences in these narratives indicate untouched areas of the colonial experience she would plunder in later stories and anticipate the postcolonial critiques of subsequent writers.