The Māori According to Katherine Mansfield: A Postcolonial Feminist Approach

Abstract

[]Abstract] This undergraduate dissertation explores Katherine Mansfield’s representations of Māori people in her early texts, written between 1907 and 1915, through a postcolonial feminist approach. For this purpose, I analyze three short stories—“How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped” (1912), “Summer Idyll” (1907), and “Young Country” (1913)—with special attention to ethnic difference, gender relations, and cultural identity; additionally, I explore the relationship between colonizer and colonized women through her portrayal of both the white settlers and the Māori in the social context of colonial New Zealand. As for the methodology, I rely on Gerri Kimber and Vincent O’Sullivan’s The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, 1898-1915 for texts that strongly feature Māori characters. For an introductory approach to postcolonial feminism, I refer to the work of Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Gayatri Spivak, and Deepika Bahri. In addition, I examine the available critical literature on Mansfield’s early writings, particularly Janet Wilson’s postcolonial readings. Then, I consider in detail the three texts selected, through a close reading analysis that takes their context into account. Lastly, I refer to historical sources such as George Grey’s Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealand Race and dictionaries like Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges’ A Dictionary of First Names, which contextualize some of Mansfield’s literary devices. This paper consists of two main parts: the first part provides a definition of postcolonial feminism, its object of study and key concepts, which are used as the framework for the literary analysis; the second part begins by exploring different critical approaches to Mansfield’s work and its postcolonial elements. This section is also divided in three subsections, each of which is dedicated to the analysis of a short story’s subject matter and stylistic features. The three texts studied portray a complex relationship between a female settler and one or more Māori women. The relationships differ in nature and fluctuate between fascination, fear, and attraction; moreover, the settler usually finds in her Māori counterpart an alternative to the western values that have been imposed upon her. Through a postcolonial feminist reading, I conclude that Māori women are central to Mansfield’s production during her early years as a writer though these representations are ambivalent and complex. While Māori culture often appears as liberating and attractive, this portrayal also results in essentialist tropes, exoticism, and the ambivalence that is common in colonizer literature; nevertheless, Mansfield experiments with binaries of gender, ethnicity, and culture, which produces a multilayered representation of the intersections between settler and indigenous women in the colonial setting