Katherine Mansfield and the Gardens of the Soul

Abstract

Despite the recent revival of critical interest in Mansfield's ‘In the Botanical Gardens’ (1907), much remains to be said concerning this brief story in terms of textual analysis and also of contextualisation, notably with regard to Mansfield's other early – and often fragmentary – attempts at writing fiction, but also to her mature works. This article focuses on this 1907 sketch in an attempt to explore its aesthetic contexts and political implications. It considers Mansfield's invocations of subjectivity and her pursuit of psychological insight, within a pattern that counterpoints nature and culture, rationality and the unconscious, individuality and wholeness, civilisation and the primitive, Europe and its others. A comparison with works by Walter Pater, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence completes the analysis of this story, which arguably played a pivotal role in Mansfield's literary development, and which offers us a vantage point to reassess the transition from aestheticism to impress...