Chelsea Swan

Katherine Mansfield’s letters and notebooks often betray a preoccupation with issues of the self. In one notebook entry she exclaims, ”if one was true to oneself . . . True to oneself! Which self? Which of my many – well, really, that’s what it looks like coming to – hundreds of selves” While Woolf claims to have had only a very glancing knowledge of who Freud was, Mansfield’s work has been linked to his theories of the self. I think he was a quack with a perverse interest, and not just that, he discounted women and their experiences and supported their rape and molestation. However, in the context of Mansfield let us just look at what she would have been aware of. Katherine Mansfield sought “to go deep — to speak to the secret self we all have — to acknowledge that”

The idea of a “secret self “can mean a self that is hidden from oneself, dwelling unconsciously within us. Or it could indicate a self intentionally concealed from others, perhaps because of shame, or fear of ridicule or disapproval. Then there are the aspects of our characters that are inaccessible to others, either because of people’s perceptual limitations or because our personalities contain enigmatic, unintelligible attributes. All these facets of the self are manifest in the interior world of thoughts, dreams, fantasies and memories.

Mansfield’s theory of self, recorded in her journal and letters, is developed in her fiction. However, Mansfield’s conceptions of the self-ruminate more on whether there is a true self to be sought rather wanting to be a self, whole and truthful.