Anti-Epiphanies: Thoughts On Katherine Mansfield's Endings
(both the stories I talk about here are online in full—links below—and both are very short)
Almost all Katherine Mansfield’s stories end abruptly: it seems an aesthetic instinct, like a built-in metronome. In her later stories—which in the collected edition I’m reading follow “Bliss”—she finesses these endings into remarkably complex anti-epiphanies, refusing us knowledge as much as revealing it.
In many of the stories—“Revelations,” “The Escape,” “The Man Without A Temperament,” “The Voyage,” and “The Doll’s House”—we suddenly pull out from protagonists’ points of view to get their perceptions, but not their interpretations. We don’t know if they’ve learned anything or will change; we may realize that we’ve been wrong all along, but we don’t know if a character has been wrong along with us. The endings can be processed emotionally and intellectually, but ultimately I find them unusually irreducible. With other writers—Cheever, Joyce come to mind—I usually find interpretation blends with my initial reading into a unified, enriched experience. With Mansfield, I can point to what I think the endings mean, but on re-reads, they remain as weird as on the first.
I think this requires overall brevity (or else the jumps from character to character in “At The Bay” and “The Doll’s House). We need to know enough about a character to feel that we “get” him or her, but the weirdness—that’s a technical literary term—springs from an interaction that while natural is also coincidental. The ‘plot,’ which may only be a character going about his or her daily business in particular circumstances, prepares us for the weirdness, but doesn’t lead us to it. Often, we don’t have enough information to know what to make of the character’s action, or how to relate it back to previous events in the story. We can interpret, but if we do we’re going off-piste.
In “The Fly,” we could read the boss’s tormenting the ink-trapped fly as a parallel to how God/the Universe/Fate has treated the boss, killing his son in the Great War. The boss’s thinking recalls God saying to Satan, “Take now my servant Job”:
But just then the boss had an idea. He plunged his pen back into the ink, leaned his thick wrist on the blotting-paper, and as the fly tried its wings down came a great heavy blot. What would it make of that? What indeed! The little beggar seemed absolutely cowed, stunned, and afraid to move because of what would happen next.
The boss’s actions could equally symbolize European leaders in the Great War, sending wave after wave of their sons “over the top” to be gunned down by machine gun fire. The boss, like the emperors and prime ministers, is “stout, rosy, still going strong,” as his friend, Woodifield, sees it (or not; the boss sees himself as broken). But I think that’s extraneous to the emotional effect of the story, which arises from our simultaneous empathy for the fly, which Mansfield openly anthropomorphizes, and the upending of our feelings for the boss. Before this in the story, he wasn’t an entirely unsympathetic figure. He’d built up his business to pass onto his son; he gave his friend a revitalizing drink (though only after taking satisfaction in his own, relatively superior position). But how quickly the feeling for his son vanishes:
He started forward and pressed the bell for Macey.
“Bring me some fresh blotting-paper,” he said sternly,”and look sharp about it.” And while the old dog padded away he fell to wondering what it was he had been thinking about before. What was it? It was…He took out his handkerchief and passed it inside his collar. For the life of him he could not remember.
Does he want to return to thinking about the fly? Or about his son? Does it matter? In either case, what limited empathy he is capable of is so quickly swept away. Mansfield’s vagueness doesn’t feel like a trick—we’re getting the old man’s thoughts, and he can’t remember what he’d been thinking—and it leaves us unaccompanied in our horror, perhaps a little unnerved at empathizing with a fly more than with the men’s dead sons.
While in general Mansfield uses effusions that would be laughable in contemporary American prose—“oh” this and that, lots of “quite,” “rather,” exclamation points and emdashed asides—in her endings she pulls back, and as she might write, the effect is rather chilling.
“Miss Brill” ends as it begins, with the spinster teacher thinking tenderly of her beloved fur. In the interim, she’s been out for her Sunday crowd-watching in the Jardins Publiques. While she considers this a favorite pastime, she mostly seems to find the passersby funny or infuriating, or idolizes them, as she does a “fine old man” and the “beautifully dressed” boy and girl she prepares to listen to. But the boy and girl laugh at her:
“No, not now,” said the girl. “Not here, I can’t.”
“But why? Because of that stupid old thing at the end there?” asked the boy. “Why does she come here at all—who wants her? Why doesn’t she keep her silly old mug at home?”
“It’s her fu-ur which is so funny,” giggled the girl. “It’s exactly like a fried whiting.”
“Ah, be off with you!” said the boy in an angry whisper. Then: “Tell me, ma petite chere—”
“No, not here,” said the girl. “Not yet.”
Up to this point, we’ve gotten in-depth, second-by-second accounting and explanation of Miss Brill’s thoughts about everyone. None needed here. But doesn’t Mansfield’s refusal to specify come like a crack in the earth opening up at our feet? We’re on our own; she’s not going to give us any guidelines, any path. Instead she changes the subject:
… On her way home she [Miss Brill] usually bought a slice of honey-cake at the baker’s. It was her Sunday treat. Sometimes there was an almond in her slice, sometimes not. It made a great difference. If there was an almond it was like carrying home a tiny present—a surprise—something that might very well not have been there. She hurried on the almond Sundays and struck the match for the kettle in quite a dashing way.
But to-day she passed the baker’s by, climbed the stairs, went into the little dark room—her room like a cupboard—and sat down on the red eiderdown. She sat there for a long time. The box that the fur came out of was on the bed. She unclasped the necklet quickly; quickly, without looking, laid it inside. But when she put the lid on she thought she heard something crying.
Striking the match for her stove in “quite a dashing way”? Could there be any better example of the smallness of her life? (Show vs. tell indeed). Typically for Mansfield, the detail comes in reported dialogue directly embedded the narrative—this is Miss Brill’s view of her own actions. For us, I think, it’s a far more crushing follow-up to the boy and girl than any direct response would have been. To them she’s a “stupid old thing”; to herself she’s dashing in the way she lights her stove. The next paragraph deals the coup de grace. Her apartment—the one in which she’s dashing—is like a cupboard; the same term she used to mock passersby earlier. That’s as close as she gets to self-pity, or self-awareness.
Instead she apparently pities her fur. Is this arrested development, a childlike ability to personify and empathize with an animal or object more than with human beings? Is it sentiment? Identification? The repetition of “quickly” draws our attention to her not looking at the fur as she puts it away. Does she fancy that it’s crying because she’s rejected it, or because of the boy and girl, or both? Is she ashamed for denying that of herself that was being mocked? Is this a redemptive act of empathy, or a confirmation of her inability? Mansfield’s refusal to guide our interpretation leaves the incident elusive, but psychologically accurate—and, symbolically, it has a long heritage, back to Peter denying Jesus three times before the cock crowed. That’s a lot to pack into two sentences.
Do the characters share our sense of the endings’ significance? In most cases, no—or not that we’re aware of. That may be the most poignant result of Mansfield’s withholding. There’s the possibility of seeing, if not of changing—but for those involved? We have no idea. We’ve been pulled away.
