Capt. Cusack Replies

Cusack, John

doi:10.1176/ajp.149.9.1276-b

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 3 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The sacred tree was also valued by pagans as axis mundi (the axis of the world), because, as Carole Cusack points out, it was crucial to their idea of the centre. 36 The tree that connects the earth to both the underworld below and the heavens above is identified by D. H. Lawrence as representing the might of Pan and a phallocentric tradition: '[it] is a strong-willed, powerful thing-in-itself, reaching up and reaching down […] it thrusts green hands and huge limbs at the light above and sends huge legs and gripping toes down, down between the trees and rocks, to the earth's middle'. 37 In the story 'See Saw' (1919), Mansfield presents a feminist reinterpretation of the pagan tradition of the sacred tree and its derivative, the phallic-shaped, upright pillar, as markers of the centre (to tame and make meaningful hostile territory), and she overturns their associations of ritual and the sacred.…”

Section: The Sacred Tree and The Arboreal Epiphanymentioning

confidence: 99%

Katherine Mansfield and Anima Mundi: France and the Tradition of Nature Personified

Wilson

2016

Katherine Mansfield’s French Lives

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This chapter proposes a speculative reading of Katherine Mansfield's work in relation to the medieval concept of anima mundi (world soul), that is, the belief in an animistic universe in which the earth is revivified through a spiritus mundi (spirit of the world). Although no explicit link can be made, I suggest that Mansfield had affinities with medieval cosmology which fostered a more participatory relationship between the human subject and the created world than the post-Cartesian world view does. I also suggest that this relationship between the self and the 'other' is often marked by a 'decentring' modernist aesthetic that enables her to represent it as odd, disturbing or disruptive. The first section of this chapter identifies central concepts associated with the belief in anima mundi, as found in the writings of the French philosophers, writers and artists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This is followed by a discussion of three motifs associated with the tradition of nature personified that survived into modernist culture with reference to particular stories in which Mansfield seemingly rewrites them into a contemporary idiom.

show abstract

Section: The Sacred Tree and The Arboreal Epiphanymentioning

confidence: 99%

Katherine Mansfield and Anima Mundi: France and the Tradition of Nature Personified

Wilson

2016

Katherine Mansfield’s French Lives

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Capt. Cusack Replies

Cited by 1 publication

References 3 publications

Katherine Mansfield and Anima Mundi: France and the Tradition of Nature Personified

Katherine Mansfield and Anima Mundi: France and the Tradition of Nature Personified

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About