In this extract, which is from the first page of Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, we are introduced to protagonists Josephine and Constantia in the days after their father has died. The extract sets the tone for their worries and the friction in their relationship as they disagree on certain things following their father’s death.
The extract starts with ‘The week after was one of the busiest of their lives’ (p.230, all subsequent quotations are from p.230 until otherwise stated)[1], which sets the fast-paced tone of the text, as well as letting the reader know that something important has recently happened to draw attention. The fact that the death is not mentioned and we are merely told ‘The week after…’ symbolises the way the sisters feel unable to discuss the death.
When the girls lie down, we learn ‘it was only their bodies that rested’. This metaphor depicts their anxiety strikingly, as does ‘their minds went on, thinking things out, talking things over, wondering, deciding, trying to remember where….’ The repetition of these short phrases gives the text a fast pace, which represents how the sister’s minds are racing. The use of four dots in the ellipsis after ‘where….’ indicates a longer pause than a standard three-dot ellipsis, symbolising the girls to be unable to remember what they wanted to as their minds are overrun with anxiety. Such deviations from traditional punctuation reflect the unique nature of Modernist writing.
We learn that ‘Constantia lay like a statue, her hands by her sides… the sheet up to her chin. She stared at the ceiling.’ This description eerily mimics how a body in a coffin would lie. A key motif in the story is that Constantia remains obedient and scared of her father, even after he has died.[2] The imagery of her lying down shows her to feel the need to copy her father, as though she should be dead too, because she is so obedient.
Presented as the more thoughtful of the characters, Constantia asks: “Do you think father would mind if we gave his top hat to the porter?” Despite her anxieties, she still has time to consider the porter; “he’d appreciate a top hat… a present. He was always very nice to father”. This shows her kindness and helps readers build empathy with her. By contrast, Josephine ‘snapped’ with: “The porter?… Why even the porter? What a very extraordinary idea!” The exclamation mark emphasises Josephine’s harsh tone, and shows her to be the more verbally aggressive when compared to Constantia’s timid speech. The question mark, followed by “What a very extraordinary idea!” sounds patronising to Constantia, and shows that Josephine was asking a rhetorical questioning by giving Constantia no time to answer it.
Josephine’s impatience with her sister is shown by her ‘flouncing’ on her pillow, meaning that she moved in an exaggerated and irritable way. Her conflicting emotions are portrayed as she ‘nearly giggles’ and has to tell herself to “Remember” her father’s death as she ‘fought down’ the laugher. ‘The giggle mounted, mounted’ is an example of repetition to emphasise the feeling of laughter overpowering her. In the same paragraph, Josephine ‘clenched her hands; she fought it down; she frowned fiercely at the dark’, showing her to seemingly have a physical struggle between her duality of being in mourning, yet also having uncontrollable laughter. She reminds herself of the death ‘terribly sternly’, and the use of two negative words consecutively sounds forced, to an extent where they almost cancel each other out. This makes it seem as though she is over-compensating for laughing. The fact that the reader knows about her trying not to laugh, meanwhile her sister seems much more upset (due to the free indirect narration), further makes readers sympathise with Constantia.
The narrator reveals Josephine’s internal monologue as she imagines the porter’s head ‘disappearing, popped out, like a candle, under father’s hat….’. The fact that the narrator uses ‘father’s hat’ shows that the narrator is using free indirect discourse. As explained previously, this is where the third person narration maintains elements of first person narration by showing a character’s unspoken thoughts (in this case Josephine as the narration names her dad’s hat as “father’s hat”). Free indirect discourse is part of what makes Modernist narration so unique. The imagery of ‘like a candle’ to describe the porter’s head relates to the semantic field of death and funerals within the extract. This imagery in the description is significant, given how the sisters disagreed about giving the porter the hat. It could symbolise that if the porter wears the hat, the ‘candle’ will be snuffed out, so perhaps Josephine wants to keep the hat in order to keep the memory of their father alive and not extinguished. However, it is uncertain if Mansfield meant the imagery in this way. Josephine also remembers the happier times when she and her sister had laughed so much that ‘their beds had simply heaved’. The use of ‘heaved’ suggests that their beds moved from them laughing so much, which is an example of hyperbole[3].
Towards the end of the extract, Constantia asks: “Do you think we ought to have their dressing gowns died?” Josephine ‘almost shrieked’ in reply: “Black?”. This one-word response emphasises Josephine’s dismissal of Constantia’s ideas that we see throughout. To Constantia, “it doesn’t seem sincere” if they only wear black when they see people and wear normal colours at home, showing her to have a conscientious side, and creating empathy between reader and character. Her speech is interrupted, indicated by the extended hyphen after “it doesn’t seem sincere… to wear black out of doors… and then when we’re at home—”. This shows Josephine once again as being more verbally aggressive, not letting her sister finish what she is saying and lexically positioning herself above her sister.
The extract ends with the simile of the sisters “creeping off to the bathroom like black cats” (p.231)[4]. Here we see Josephine’s unspoken thought that clearly shows her disapproval of Constantia’s idea of them wearing black dressing gowns. The use of “black cats” connotes ideas surrounding death and superstition.
Bibliography
Baldick, Chris, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, (New York, Oxford University Press, 2001)
Berkman, Sylvia, Katherine Mansfield: A Critical Study (USA: Yale University Press, 1971)
Crystal, David, ‘On tomorrow and to-morrow and to morrow’, 29/5/2012, < http://david-crystal.blogspot.com/2012/05/on-tomorrow-and-to-morrow-and-to-morrow.html > [Accessed 12/3/22]
Hanson, Clare, ‘Moments of Being: Modernist Short Fiction’, Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880–1980, ed. By Clare Hanson (Palgrave Macmillan: London, 1985), pp. 55-81
Mansfield, Katherine, Selected Stories, ed. By Angela Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
Reboul, Anne., Delfitto, Denis and Fiorin, Gaetano, ‘The Semantic Properties of Free Indirect Discourse’, Annual Review of Linguistics,2 (2016) pp.255-271 https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011415-040722 [Accessed 12/3/22]
[1] Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories, ed. By Angela Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) p.230
[2] Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 162
[3] Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 119
[4] Katherine Mansfield, Selected Stories, ed. By Angela Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) p.231
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