Me or I? The Search for the Self in the Early Writings of Katherine Mansfield

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Katherine Mansfield’s diaries and letters reveal a lifelong concern with notions of the self. In this paper, I examine two of Mansfield’s early stories, ‘Vignette: Summer in Winter’ and ‘The Education of Audrey’, to explore how her enquiry into the construction of the self in fiction demonstrates some affinity with the psychological theories of William James and Sigmund Freud. Mansfield’s approach is intuitive, and this gives rise to contradiction as she experiments with the lexicon of the self and with the form and structure of her stories. Whilst Mansfield posed no ‘theory’ of the self in an academic sense, her fiction does however, illustrate her continuing attempts to puzzle out, and to accurately represent, the complex and mutable nature of the human psyche.