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The Development of Katherine Mansfield’s First-Person Narratives

In narrative terms, the transition from Victorian tale to modern short story in Anglophone literature has often been characterized as a movement from ‘telling’ to ‘showing.’ Anthony Alpers refers to this development as “getting rid of the narrator” (The Life 238), while Clare Hanson describes it as moving “from ‘teller’ to indirect free narration, and from ‘tale’ to ‘text,’” as part of a larger shift from “‘discourse’ to ‘image’ in the art and literature of the period” (1). In the nineteenth-century tale, indeed, a first-person narrator—often a polished version of the author (Shaw 114–15)—guides the reader through the story, guaranteeing its authenticity and providing a certain moral framework. The hallmark of most nineteenth-century tales, this narrative mode is reminiscent of the tale’s origins in communal, oral storytelling traditions. A desire to question narrative authority and remove the teller gradually from the tale characterizes the so-called modern short story, the origins of which—at least in Britain—are usually traced to the 1880s. Early experiments with this other narrative mode, in which focalization alternates with narration,1 can be found in the proto-impressionist psychological sketches of George Egerton, Hubert Crackanthorpe, Ella D’Arcy, and Ernest Dowson (Korte 103–107; Malcolm and Malcolm 12–13). Yet only with the figural narration of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and—especially—Katherine Mansfield does the modern short story really come into its own. In such a story, the narrator virtually disappears behind