Foreign Languages and Mother Tongues: From Exoticism to Cannibalism in Katherine Mansfield's Short Stories

Summary

Mansfield's relationship with France is expressed in many different ways in her short stories, one of which is the fundamental role played by the French language. Mansfield confronts English-speaking readers with a foreign language that constantly interacts with their mother tongue, creating an intriguing tension between the two languages, both of which are unsettled as a result, and lose their familiarity. This tension puzzles native speakers, whether French or English, albeit through different processes; the title of one of her most famous stories, ‘Je ne parle pas français’, through its very paradoxical nature, epitomises the issue of the interaction between mother tongue and foreign tongue. This goes beyond what Roland Barthes calls the ‘effet de réel’ (effect of reality), in which French is the semiological vehicle of Frenchness; in Mansfield's stories the diegetic space and a certain exoticism which it purportedly creates are immediately swept away by irony, as French words force themselves into the text, thus producing linguistic and semantic blurring.

When Mansfield imposes the Other's tongue on her reader, or what Derrida would call the double ‘monolingualism of the Other’, she opens up, in the core of literature (which Proust already views as ‘a sort of foreign language’), an in-between space in which two languages will interact and be questioned. My purpose in this essay is to show the place and role Mansfield accords the French language and its various degrees of intensity and meaning, focusing on the stories which are set in France. To this end, I shall focus on ways that irony constantly undermines clichés (cultural, social and linguistic), on how the concept of Frenchness is constructed, and on how the mother-tongue is questioned, more particularly in the schizophrenic process at work in ‘Je ne parle pas français’ when, between the English and the French characters, language becomes a ‘cannibal-language’ and is synonymous with power and mastery over the Other. This cannibal-language will be considered here mostly as the aggressive appropriation of the Other through his/ her language in order to leave him/her speechless and powerless.