Ambivalence, Language and the Uncanny in Katherine Mansfield's In a German Pension

Abstract

This essay uses an observation on the strangeness of language in the opening section of Freud's essay ‘Das Unheimliche’ to describe the unsettling effects created by the stories in Mansfield's first collection, In A German Pension. It relates the formal ambivalence of the stories to their thematic concern with deception and self-deception, insinuation and suspicion, showing how the reader is troublingly implicated in the processes of speculation and intrusion foregrounded in the narratives. The essay concludes by concentrating on Mansfield's technical concern with the disconcerting slippage of meaning between languages and the uncanny potential of mixed languages, erratic voices and ambiguous expressions.