Fourteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

It was an audacious insult to put in writing, but Virginia Woolf did just that when she took offense at how writer Katherine Mansfield smelled at their first meeting. Woolf wrote in her diary on October 10, 1917 that her first impression of Mansfield was that she “stinks like a—well civet cat that had taken to street walking,” referring to the animalic base notes and excessive amounts of the perfume that Mansfield apparently was wearing. This episode is significant for this study of smell in Mansfield’s writing: it demonstrates Mansfield’s love and use of scent. It made me wonder, then, if Mansfield’s love of perfumes, scents, and smells also would be reflected in her writing and what meaning they would carry in her stories. Scent was more for Mansfield than a perfume choice. Though various scents make appearances throughout Mansfield’s short stories, critics have neglected to examine how they serve the themes, plots, or characters of the stories. The role and function of scents in Mansfield’s short stories, I argue, are to reveal her personal interpretations and the social and political meanings of the scenes in which they are placed. Mansfield uses scent to challenge class status and the hegemony of heterosexuality. We know, furthermore, that Mansfield was precise and intentional in her writing, choosing words for their rhythm and cadence as if she were writing a score. Thus, we must examine the effect of scent descriptions in her short stories for the meaning they contribute to the whole.