In Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading, Otherwise, Shoshana Felman calls for a disambiguation of the relationship between literature and psychoanalytical thought, hoping to ‘disrupt altogether the position of mastery’ which psychoanalysis has traditionally been given over literature, and privileging instead a ‘relation of interiority’, where each may be seen to inhabit the other. It is in reading alongside this notion of mutual interiorities that psychoanalytic thought might be most productively and generously engaged in readings of texts such as those of Katherine Mansfield: not in its being applied to her work, that is, but rather ‘implied’ within it, touching on some of its darker, hungrier moments.

This article, in addressing the experience of hunger, understands the identity of a subject to be formed as much by what it allows to enter itself as by what it refuses to ingest. Mansfield's short story ‘Bliss’ (1918), a tale which, as I shall show, stages the preclusion of a hidden desire, pays keen attention to the interiority at once of the text, of the body, and of the home, as sites of secrecy. Mansfield's characteristically disembowelling irony emerges through the articulation of a desire within a narrative which renders that desire impossible. The potential emergence of an authentic self – what we might, here, call ‘bliss’ – is twinned with its contingent and simultaneous prohibition. The subject Bertha, craving authentic integration into the world, is stifled by the very matter through which she attempts to define herself. I will suggest, in moving from Sara Ahmed's writing on the domestic interior to Maud Ellmann's on hunger and starvation, that hunger anchors the human subject in domestic space and that our relationship to food is prototypical for our relationships to others. Ingestion shapes the way in which the subject learns to recognise itself as an embodied being, distinguishing outside from inside. Hunger thus concerns the will to be integrated into materiality, making a subject ‘matter’.

There are compelling ethical difficulties in writing about hunger. There is no approach to hunger that does not trouble the place of the body and the way we are to inhabit it. Hunger, like pain, as Ellmann points out, is the kind of pressingly interior bodily phenomenon that cannot be known or shared from without.