Mansfield's Charm: The Enchantment of Domestic ‘Bliss’

Abstract

Mansfield's fiction both illustrates and fulfills the modern longing for enchantment, and it acquires fantastic qualities in its insistence upon what Janet Lyon calls ‘creative practices of re-enchantment’. Mansfield's charm comes into sharp focus in two stories about the domestic interior's potential for strangeness and transformation: ‘Feuille d'Album’ and ‘Bliss’. These stories encourage newfound appreciation for the talismanic power of ordinary objects and the enchantment harbored in arrangements of domestic space. In these explorations of charmingly uncanny interiors, Mansfield's fiction guides readers to accept that what Max Weber called the ‘great art’ of modernity can be found in creative practices of everyday life. In writing the domestic art of the pianissimo, Mansfield fosters a sense of art and fantasy not as escapes from reality, but as transformations of it in flickers and glowing embers. Mansfield is therefore a modernist celebrant of the possibilities of domesticity, the transformative cre...