Sarah Sandley: Maurizio Ascari, Cinema and the Imagination in Katherine Mansfield's Writing

Summary

Mansfield's visual perception was unusually acute. It was an asset when observing or recalling for the purposes of fiction, but it was a liability when she was trying to concentrate on her writing; she would, for instance, deliberately turn her desk away from a view so as not to be distracted. Given this, and given Mansfield's daring, it is not surprising that she was an early enthusiast of ‘the movies’. From the first days of this new form, she unashamedly watched silent films. She also tried her hand at acting as an extra and was a fan of Charlie Chaplin. ‘Unashamed’ is an apposite description since early silent movies, regarded as the quintessence of photographic realism, were incompatible with the tenets advocated by the avant-garde Rhythm, which strove to move beyond what its editor, John Middleton Murry, regarded as an outmoded aesthetic.

Vincent O'Sullivan and Antony Alpers were the first to draw critical attention to the fact that Mansfield quickly grasped the inter-art potential of cinema, O'Sullivan for instance describing Mansfield's early piece ‘The Pic-Nic’ as ‘a film script’. Maurizio Ascari, in Cinema and the Imagination in Katherine Mansfield's Writing, gives a new and interesting account of the ways in which Mansfield used film as a tutor to assist her as she searched for a new form. It was an instrument she appropriated to develop her narrative technique, using cinematic devices as aesthetic tools. Ascari identifies three phases. ‘Early cinematic stories’ (36) like ‘The Little Governess’ are structured as episodic, filmic vignettes. They deploy ellipses as the equivalent of the cinematic techniques of dissolving and fading out, juxtapose scenes for psychological effect, and deploy the literary equivalent of long shots to draw attention to body language, gesture and costume.

In the second phase, which Ascari describes as a ‘turning point in the development of Mansfield's aesthetics’ (56), there is a shift from representing reality to recording it. This development emphasises the vitalism, rather than the realism, of cinema, and is best expressed by Mansfield in her well-known letter to painter Dorothy Brett: ‘When I write about ducks I swear that I am a white duck with a round eye, floating in a pond fringed with yellow blobs and taking an occasional dart at the other duck with a round eye, which floats beneath me’ (qtd. 56).