In ‘Prelude’, which appeared in Katherine Mansfield’s first short-fiction collection, Bliss and Other Stories, Kezia, uninterested in the imperious Isabel’s game of dolls, wanders astray through the grounds of her new family home, a large, gabled homestead in the gloomy hinterlands of early-twentieth-century Wellington— Karori, though it is not named as such in the text. She spies a bull in its paddock through a hole in the wooden fence, retreats through the orchard, then up the grassy slope and into the tangled garden, only to find herself once again back at the big iron gates that mark the property’s boundary. To one side of the gates lies a flower garden, with box edges and specimens of all kinds: camellias, syringa, roses, geraniums, verbena, mignonette, pansies, red-hot pokers and others the young girl had never seen before. To the other, a dense mass of dark and strange bush; “the frightening side,” Kezia thinks.[1]
Mansfield’s gate marks the edge of the hermetic world of her story, flanked by environments of respective order and chaos. Though it is the planted garden into which Kezia withdraws, sitting on the cold timber of the garden border while she takes inventory of its floral bounty, it is the bush that exerts the strongest pull on her and the older Burnell-Fairfield women as they endure the isolation of their new dwelling, appearing to them in night-time shadows, fantasies of seduction by strangers in the garden, the mocking calls of ruru and petrels, the toothy, yellow-green rosette of the aloe plant. Even Stanley, the family patriarch, feels its force. He who acquires land as gentlemanly sport—“Weather like this set a final seal on his bargain,” he thinks, awakening one morning; “He felt, somehow, that he had bought the lovely day, too, got it chucked in dirt cheap with the house and ground”—feels the danger of being so far out on the frontier, and is gripped by pangs of panic when approaching the gates after a day out on business.[2] While Stanley fears intrusion, bothering the women is an internal, psychic unease in their condition as bourgeois women of a colonial outpost, fated, as Linda Burnell observes, to “go on having children and Stanley will go on making money and the children and the gardens will grow bigger and bigger.”[3] More gates, too, will be erected.
Part of the Katherine Mansfield Centenary celebrations, George Watson’s exhibition at City Gallery Te Whare Toi, Beauty Incarnate, is the latest of her projects to engage critically with the literature and legacy of the acclaimed modernist writer. Anchored mid-air by thick chains at the centre of the show is Huni (2022), a sculptural gate formed of wrought iron and laser-cut steel. A row of curly Ss is tessellated along the bottom of its grille, each kissing its mirror image to form a procession of hearts, mimicking a feature common to ornamental Victorian palisades. Weaving through the spokes are several steel strands strung with koru and starburst shapes like flags on bunting. Two strands bear a butterfly-like form. Seen from the side, its wings jut out threateningly. A cowboy’s spurs.
Threaded with these sinuous, barbed kōwhaiwhai forms, Huni layers two radically different conceptions of space: the gate that demarcates, parcels and privatises; whakapapa that grows and connects across time. This complex, politicised commingling counters the dyad Mansfield imagined around the border-space of her gate in ‘Prelude’, that of here/safety, there/threat; of property owned by the family, and the unknown (read: unacquired) lands beyond it. In Watson’s work, the borders are prickly and the sutures frail. In Filly (2022), shown at Envy6011 last year, she bound two steel heart-halves together roughly with fraying silk ribbon, her violent corsetry jarring with the girlishness of the form but doubled by the meat hooks pierced into the steel as hanging fixtures. Urban Depersonalisation (2023), a work made for He Rāwaho, a collaboration with Peter Simpson shown at Tāmaki Makaurau’s Coastal Signs in June, is a British flag torn into four pieces and stitched up, again with ribbons. Whitened and stiffly crumpled, the flag fabric looks like a cut of tripe. Overlaid with chicken wire, rabbit-fur stars and spirals of twisted muka, it recounts a tale of tears and ensnarements, and then their subsequent repair, which, paradoxically, only reinscribes the breaks.
Theorising dreams, Freud ventured the idea of ‘day residues’ to name the thoughts, events and images that a dreamer retains from waking life within a dream state.[4] These residues disturb total rest; the mind turns them over, makes them manifest in often strange, not wholly detectable ways, in search of resolution. Literature, like dreams, bears these residues—of the author’s life, but also of history. “Nations themselves are narrations,” Edward Saïd writes in Culture and Imperialism, and it is her awareness of this that draws Watson to Mansfield’s work.[5] The author’s use of land as a pictorial device and indigeneity as an unnamed, otherly force that haunts her characters aren’t only literary acts but colonial ones. Watson takes upon herself the analyst’s work of revealing these machinations, and of revealing how they persist, residues of residues, within contemporary psychic life and Pākehā self-image.
Wrapping around the walls of the gallery is Dear Miss Mansfield (2023), consisting of several names painted in ochre red and a gothic font. Kathleen, Maata, Huia, Lottie, Marina, L. M., Carlotta, Katherine, Ida, Juliet, Hinemoa. They encircle the room, mostly pet names or pseudonyms used by Mansfield in her letters, journals and stories, both for herself and her intimate companions, namely, Ida Baker and Maata Mahupuku. With both of these women, Mansfield had long-lasting and intense relationships, likely sexual and romantic to some degree. She often expressed her affection for them effusively, almost aggressively. In the extract from which the exhibition takes its title, Mansfield declares to Mahupuku, accosts her, “What do you mean by being so superlatively beautiful as you went away? You witch! You are beauty incarnate.”6 The two also feature extensively as characters in her fiction. Dialogue from ‘Summer Idyll’, a short story Mansfield wrote in 1907,[7] sounds throughout the gallery. Maata, made into the character of Marina, assumes the role of the older, wiser girl, who, over a soundscape of bird and insect noises, nursery rhymes and ambient reverb, instructs ‘little Hinemoa’, Mansfield’s own surrogate, on the myth of the rata tree and how to properly allow oneself to sink into, and therefore see, the ocean’s darkest depths.
“Weaving through the spokes are several steel strands strung with koru and starburst shapes like flags on bunting. Two strands bear a butterfly-like form. Seen from the side, its wings jut out threateningly. A cowboy’s spurs.
Character reversals and slippages like these occur throughout Mansfield’s work and are one of the features of her writing to which Watson is most attentive. A trope of modernism on one hand, dispersing the narrative perspective, they are, on another, a form of contrived parapraxis, where repressed desires burst to the surface of the text. Stamped repetitively around the space, Dear Miss Mansfield mimics this technique, but, forced into likeness by the single font, the effect is flattening. Like Kezia, listing off the flowers she sees in the garden beds, the names become an inventory of people admired, collected and renamed by the author, one consumed by the next in a persistent, trudging utterance. Like the bush, that psychic mirror for all things dark and dangerous and more strangely beautiful than anything colonial life might offer, Mansfield’s recollections of and desire for Mahupuku, for that which is so utterly the foreign element, represent what Homi K. Bhabha calls “the narcissistic, colonialist demand that … the Other should authorize the self, recognize its priority, fulfil its outlines … and still its fractured gaze.”[8]
Mansfield famously described writing as a way to “try all sorts of lives.”[9] Her unmooredness, as an expat of a country that offered its white inhabitants only a tenuous sense of home, made her a particularly adept proponent of modernism’s persistent ‘we’, its universal subject, that may be fractured across many radically dispersed and different lives but could still surely be pieced back together by swift language; Mansfield’s established her as New Zealand’s modern daughter. Feminist, trailblazer, bisexual, ‘friendly settler’, she is also a symbol of its founding myth, that of the ‘fair colony’.
The prickly border, the frail suture, the shaken and fractured gaze. Watson insists on unassimilable oppositions. In stubborn counter to the redemptive, progressive fantasy of settler New Zealand that can often emerge in readings of Mansfield and likewise in contemporary political and civic life, Watson’s work, with its chilling defamiliarisation of beloved figures and pretty Victoriana fancies, reveals a covert yet concerted effort to build a cogent culture, upon which she then intrudes, with a reminder that this culture did and still does array itself on Māori land.
[1] Katherine Mansfield, ‘Prelude,’ in Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield (Auckland: Hutchinson Group, 1984), 32.
[2] Ibid, 24–25.
[3] Ibid, 54.
[4] Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. A. A. Brill (London: Allen & Unwin, 1915).
[5] Edward Saïd, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage Books, 1994), xiii.
[6] Katherine Mansfield, in a letter to Maata Mahupuku in The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield Volume 1, ed. Gerri Kimber, Vincent O’Sullivan, Angela Smith and Claire Davidson (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 70.
[7] This soundscape was used previously as the audio track in Watson’s moving-image work They are cruel (2021).
[8] Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 2004), 140.
[9] The sentiment was taken up as the title of the latest Mansfield biography, Claire Harman’s All Sorts of Lives, published in January this year.
George Watson, Beauty Incarnate, 1 July–15 October 2023 City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington
