The Impossible Place: Katherine Mansfield’s Imagination of Death and the Infinite

In a 1920 review of A Child of the Alps, Mansfield stigmatises Margaret Symonds’ failure to prove ‘conscious of the deserts of vast eternity that lie before us.’ These words express Mansfield’s ongoing preoccupation with death and eternity, her irrepressible need to contextualise the human in relation to the ‘absolute’. The roots of this mentality can be found in Mansfield’s early notebooks, which testify to her burgeoning existential self-questioning. Mansfield’s youthful imagination was unceasingly attracted to a ‘place’ that we may define as ‘impossible’ because it defies conceptualisation. While envisaging death as the ultimate sensory deprivation, the end of consciousness, Mansfield could not help projecting herself into an afterlife that failed to be reassuringly framed within a Christian paradigm. The result was a psychic short-circuit, an intense form of anxiety, but this obsessive drive combined with an expansive desire for the infinite, which Mansfield related both to the sea (as Freud did when he coined the term oceanic) and to music (the concepts of rhythm, Streben and Anders-streben come to mind, also in relation to Wagner and Pater, whose influence on Mansfield is known). What adds further complexity to young Mansfield’s inner landscape is her intimate interest for the connection between mind and body, notably in relation to her efforts to reconcile herself with her sexuality, also through the mirror of Wilde’s texts. The article explores this fascinating, conflict-ridden inner scenario, which fully justifies Mansfield’s famous statement: ‘My mind is like a Russian novel.’