Illness, Gender and Writing: The Case of Katherine Mansfield (review)

Katherine Mansfield wrote the most significant body of her work during the last eight years of her life when she was fighting a losing battle with tuberculosis. Simply to state this fact is to raise a number of provocative questions about the relationship of prolonged physical illness to creative work.

Mansfield is not unique in having cultivated rich stories in what would seem a poor soil of fatigue, frustration, and pain: Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Jorge Luis Borges, Walker Percy, and many others testify not only to the possibility of overcoming physical debility in order to do creative work, but indeed to the possibility that illness itself may fuel, clarify, and inform the imagination in remarkable ways. Nor is Mary Burgan the first to study a writer’s work in light of illness as a shaping force; studies of this kind are still breaking ground as the dialogue between literature and medicine continues to be articulated and an appropriate methodology worked out. In her elegant treatment of Mansfield’s life and work, Burgan has produced a useful model for such studies.

Burgan’s approach to Mansfield’s stories is essentially psychobiographical. She reads them in light of definitive (and mostly traumatic) events in Mansfield’s life, showing in her readings how the stories reflect, displace, and revise those events in ways that were variously confessional, therapeutic, apologetic, and self-empowering. The seven chapters of Illness, Gender and Writing focus successively on key events of Mansfield’s childhood (the death of an infant sister, maternal rejection, and the guilt and bafflement that resulted from those events), adolescence (sexual experimentation, venereal diseases, abortion), and brief adulthood (bereavement, domestic disruptions, and illness). Each of these life events becomes a vantage point from which to interpret the complex symbolism and suggestive plot constructions of the fiction.

Burgan’s readings of particular stories are preceded by reflections on biographical material viewed through a variety of psychological lenses, including those of Sigmund Freud, Josef Breuer, Melanie Klein, Helene Deutsch, Erik Erikson, Karen Horney, and Hilde Bruch. These reflections focus on psychological, physical, and psychosomatic disorders, and in every case raise the question of how gender figures in the construction and phenomenology of illness. A wide range of voices from the ranks of recent feminist and psychoanalytic critics (most notably Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan) are brought to bear in considering the dynamics of displacement and transformation that inform character and situation. Finally, she calls on medical historians, medical anthropologists, and philosophers of medicine such as Michel Foucault, Edward Shorter, and Susan Sontag to provide another layer of critical insight.

At times Burgan’s rich eclecticism and wide scholarship tend to overpower the primary work of Illness, Gender and Writing, which is to offer us a way of understanding how writing became, for Mansfield as it has for others, a powerful device for working through her own losses, sexual confusions, social constraints, and the burden and meaning of physical suffering. At other times, her minute focus on biographical detail seems to digress from rather than contribute to the literary analysis. Nevertheless, Burgan’s meticulous attention to particulars in Mansfield’s life story and in her fiction and her judicious use of a variety of critical methods to illuminate these particulars finally provide a coherent and comprehensive understanding of the corpus of Mansfield’s work in relation to a highly examined bodily and psychic life. More importantly perhaps, it offers us a way of viewing creative life as inseparable from the life of the body, and bodily life as both manifestation of and motive for the subtle life of the mind.

Burgan exercises what can only be called compassionate imagination in assessing Mansfield’s sometimes erratic attempts to strike the true note that would avoid the sentimentalities, inflations, and self-deceptions of essentially confessional writing. “Self-examination,” she points out, is always liable not only to misdiagnosis but to revealing unacknowledged...