War Thoughts and Home: Katherine Mansfield's Model of a Hardened Heart in a Broken World

Summary

Katherine Mansfield's circle of friends would have recognised Mary Thriplow in Aldous Huxley's Those Barren Leaves. Thriplow writes running dialogues with her dead brother in a ‘secret diary devoted to his memory’, including tales of growing up in ‘Weltringham’. Huxley asks, ‘Wasn't she deliberately scratching her heart to make it bleed, and then writing stories with the red fluid?’ (82). Mansfield's journals during the period following the death of her brother Leslie (‘Chummie’) Beauchamp are conversational and emotionally introspective, but her fiction written during this period is more complicated than confessional writing. After her visit to Francis Carco in February 1915, Mansfield had started writing ‘The Aloe’, and she continued to work on it through to its 1917 publication as ‘Prelude’. ‘The Aloe’ is a narrative with images and motifs of the Great War that help define the modern age as one of despair and loss of direction. It stands as a powerful modernist statement of the tragedy of those whose deaths were left without closure as a result of the war. Allyson Booth in Postcards from the Trenches argues

that even at moments when the spaces of war seem most remote, the perceptual habits appropriate to war emerge plainly; that the buildings of modernism may delineate spaces within which one is forced to confront both war's casualties and one's distance from those casualties; that the dislocations of war often figure centrally in modernist form, even when war itself seems peripheral to modernist content.

Set in New Zealand in 1893, ‘The Aloe’ is a commentary on the fate awaiting the unborn child of the Burnell family and, as such, it is the prelude to the tragedy that awaits the real Beauchamp family.

In 1915 Mansfield had travelled into the war zone and lied her way through military checkpoints for her brief rendezvous with Francis Carco. Leslie, who had recently arrived in England ‘to join a British regiment’, helped finance her travel to France that February. The following month, the affair with Carco was over but, after her experience of travelling through military lines, she stayed alone in Carco's Paris flat to write.