Katherine Mansfield, Rhythm, and Metropolitan Primitivism

Recent scholarship has enriched our understanding of the role that Rhythm played in the emergence of early modernism, but the magazine’s pronounced primitivism has gone largely unremarked. This article argues that, as co-editor and contributor, Katherine Mansfield negotiated an ambivalent relationship to the magazine’s primitivism—ranging from romantic idealization of indigenous people to satirical mockery of the western European fascination with exotic cultures and artifacts that pervades Rhythm’s pages. It shows that while Mansfield’s Rhythm writings largely frustrate metropolitan desires for quaint exoticism, the writer did not fully escape the dynamics she ridiculed.