E. P. to L. U.: Nine Letters Written to Louis Untermeyer

Bridging the Gulf, Taking the Risk: an Exploration of "Relationships" in Katherine Mansfield's 'Juliet', 'Brave Love', and 'Prelude'

“…522 The passage in which Linda encounters her feelings about Stanley has been much discussed, with commentators agreeing on Stanley's role of sexual predator and on Linda's responses of hatred, illness, and longing to escape. Stanley has been seen only in negative terms, and earlier negative readings of Linda (for example, her "unwillingness to create or to work with the harvest of offspring", 523 ) have given way to positive readings of Linda as resisting the male threat; for example, Smith, in discussing shifts in perception of gender role in 'Prelude', sees Linda as appropriating the aloe, which at first represented masculine dominance, and making it her ship; she casts herself as a kind of Flying Dutchman who is seeking to avoid rather than find a mate. 524 Certainly the nature of Linda's feelings about Stanley is explicit and clear, giving the impression that her aloe journey is one of recognition and insight.…”

“…37 Since potentials for "relationship" are endless, attention in this thesis has been limited to those that are most credible in terms of methods such as those possibly first recognised (with regard to Mansfield's fiction) by the New Critics: "narrative pattern[s]" that emerge from "repetition of any phrase or construction" and "parallelism establishe [d] … between … separate episodes"; 38 or "sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant patterns of association: … repetitions of images and symbols in diverse contexts". 39 Such techniques, as well as allusion to myths and literary texts (also used by Mansfield, as this thesis demonstrates) are characteristic of modernism: By way of compensation for the weakening of narrative structure and unity, other modes of aesthetic ordering became more prominent [in modern fiction] -such as allusion to or imitation of literary models, or mythical archetypes; or repetition-with-variation of motifs, images, symbols, a technique often called 'rhythm', 'leitmotif', or 'spatial form'. 40 In his discussion of literary modernism, Abrams describes how T.S.…”