"Like a dry-skin itching for growth on our bodies": Katherine Mansfield's and Una Marson's Modernist Fantasies of Objecthood

Katherine Mansfield's Urewera Notebookand "The Woman at the Store" and Una Marson's "Little Brown Girl" and "The Stranger," share politically charged strategies for representing the psychological violence of imperialism. Although they write about diverse socio-political contexts, both Mansfield and Marson aestheticize the surfaces of bodies in stylistically commensurable ways in order to highlight how the forces of imperialism shape racial and gendered politics in the early twentieth century. The complex interrogations of race and gender found in Mansfield's and Marson's representations of Māori and Afro-Caribbean women and their dramatized treatments of these women as objects help transnational feminist scholars recover unrealized lines of modernist affiliation. These lines are formed by affectively shared but historically distinct experiences of colonial politics and forms of legitimation that have historically marked the surfaces of female bodies.