Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- A Note of Thanks
- The Guest List
- Introduction: A Welcome from the Host
- 1 ‘The dinner was indeed quiet’: Domestic Parties in the Work of Joseph Conrad
- 2 Prufrock, Party-Goer: Tongue-Tied at Tea
- 3 Party Joyce: From the ‘Dead’ to When We ‘Wake’
- 4 ‘Looking at the party with you’: Pivotal Moments in Katherine Mansfield's Party Stories
- 5 Virginia Woolf's Idea of a Party
- 6 Proustian Peristalsis: Parties Before, During and After
- 7 ‘Ezra through the open door’: The Parties of Natalie Barney, Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach as Lesbian Modernist Cultural Production
- 8 ‘Indeed everybody did come’: Parties, Publicity and Intimacy in Gertrude Stein's Plays
- 9 The Interracial Party of Modernist Primitivism and the Black ‘After-Party’
- 10 The Party In Extremis in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love
- 11 Bohemian Retrospects: Ford Madox Ford, Post-War Memory and the Cabaret Theatre Club
- 12 ‘Pleasure too often repeated’: Aldous Huxley's Modernity
- Index
4 - ‘Looking at the party with you’: Pivotal Moments in Katherine Mansfield's Party Stories
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- A Note of Thanks
- The Guest List
- Introduction: A Welcome from the Host
- 1 ‘The dinner was indeed quiet’: Domestic Parties in the Work of Joseph Conrad
- 2 Prufrock, Party-Goer: Tongue-Tied at Tea
- 3 Party Joyce: From the ‘Dead’ to When We ‘Wake’
- 4 ‘Looking at the party with you’: Pivotal Moments in Katherine Mansfield's Party Stories
- 5 Virginia Woolf's Idea of a Party
- 6 Proustian Peristalsis: Parties Before, During and After
- 7 ‘Ezra through the open door’: The Parties of Natalie Barney, Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach as Lesbian Modernist Cultural Production
- 8 ‘Indeed everybody did come’: Parties, Publicity and Intimacy in Gertrude Stein's Plays
- 9 The Interracial Party of Modernist Primitivism and the Black ‘After-Party’
- 10 The Party In Extremis in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love
- 11 Bohemian Retrospects: Ford Madox Ford, Post-War Memory and the Cabaret Theatre Club
- 12 ‘Pleasure too often repeated’: Aldous Huxley's Modernity
- Index
Summary
In a sketch called ‘Sunday Lunch’ (1912) written for the little magazine Rhythm, Katherine Mansfield seems to show her bohemian credentials. She knows her way around the avant-garde smart set, for this is no sedate British traditional roast followed by apple pie as its title might suggest. Here the party-guests smoke and flirt in an atmosphere ‘of agitating intimacy’. Their host manipulates his male guests: ‘“Glad you came.” Takes guest aside. “I say, that French dancing woman's here. Over there – on the leopard skin – with the Chinese fan. Pitch into her, there's a good chap.”’ This evokes shades of the contemporary doggerel about the author of erotic novels Elinor Glyn: ‘Would you like to sin / With Elinor Glyn / On a tiger skin? / Or would you prefer / To err / With her / On some other fur?’ The aura of decadent and knowing malice in the sketch, implying that the author relishes her ironic control, is countered in her short stories focusing on parties. They are about ways of seeing rather than maintaining a consistently satirical stance. The party-givers and party-goers want to project an image of themselves which is always undermined by a moment of disruption when the picture is skewed, when Mansfield's searching scrutiny reveals an aspect of the secret self, and a protagonist comes close to an epiphany which is often ultimately elusive.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Modernist Party , pp. 79 - 94Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013