Jamesian and Bergsonian Stream of Consciousness in Katherine Mansfield's ‘Prelude’ (1918)

Volume 20 , Issue 3 , December 2019 , Pages 649-662

Authors

Alan Ali Saeed 1

1 English Department, University of Sulaimani

DOI logo 10.17656/jzsb.10931

Keywords

Abstract

This paper examines some key aspects of Katherine Mansfield’s fiction with regard to selected
theories of Henri Bergson and William James, considered both in terms of more general aesthetics
and form (in terms of specifically how James’s stream of consciousness in a modified form works
in modernist fiction) and in terms of Mansfield’s characters (especially concerning: issues of
gender and social class; consciousness of different and alternative life-style possibilities; the
importance of childhood; and the relevance to them of bohemianism). In these contexts, one
particular Mansfield short story, ‘Prelude’ (1918), is analyzed also through a range of Bergson’s
theories applied analytically with reference to his concepts of duration, memory and one’s Élan
Vital as explored in his various key works, being specifically: Time and Free Will (1889), Matter
and Memory (1896), and Creative Evolution (1907) . The story itself possesses a retrospective and
nostalgic quality, for as Saikat Majumdar observes of Mansfield “her best work, especially the late
stories, have colonial settings” evoking her own childhood and adolescence, and which are “doubly
complicated by her own attachments to metropolitan Europe and her ambiguous distance from her
country of origin” (122).

My argument will focus upon and explore Mansfield’s use of stream of consciousness as a
narrative technique in both the expressions and perspectives of individual characters and also with
respect to elements of the interplay of these with the overarching narrative voice. Through such use
of stream of consciousness, Mansfield allows her reader to explore how individual character’s inner
thoughts are represented very often through the prism of an omniscient narration conveyed
stylistically through 'free indirect discourse' and shifts of focalization.

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