Voyeur, sponger, flâneur, etc.: The figures of the author and strategies of displacement and disfigurement in Katherine Mansfield’s stories

Abstract

In Katherine Mansfield’s stories, writers and artists are far from idealized. She portrays fictional authors as obnoxious (Raoul Duquette in ‘Je ne parle pas français’); spongers and would-be artists or writers in ‘Marriage à la mode’ or in ‘Bliss’; voyeurs cannibalizing on others’ lives like the eponymous protagonist in ‘Miss Brill’ (a sort of immobile flâneur; see Walter Benjamin); or repressed authors as the male novel writer and the female playwright in ‘Psychology’. This article analyses these figures of the author not mainly in reference to autobiographical questions, but essentially to elucidate Mansfield’s conception of the author, her satire of the decadents and questions related to Bloomsbury, to modernist ethics and to what her strategies of displacement of authorial issues through distorted figures of authorship reveal of her concerns and anxieties.