Coalescent Appetites

The three short fiction collections published during Mansfield's lifetime show a changing attitude

to food which mirrors her developing aesthetic. It has been widely remarked that food permeates
Mansfield's first collection, In a German Pension. In “The Modern Soul”, England is described

as “merely an island of beef flesh swimming in a warm gulf sea of gravy”, and a stuffed deer's
head has a notice tied around it in simulation of a bib, and is wished bon appétit before each
meal.33 In “A Swing of the Pendulum”, Viola, lacking a knife, bites her assailant on the hand,

while “At Lehmann's” brings us the son of a butcher, “a mean, undersized child very much like

one of his father's sausages”, and a pregnant wife who is told to stay away from customers
because she looks “unappetizing”.34 We are also told how Sabina finds delight in “cutting up

slices of Anna's marvellous chocolate spotted confections, or doing up packets of sugar almonds
in pink and blue striped bags”, a pleasure in food undermined by the fact that later Sabina is

almost molested by a customer because she does not properly understand the meaning of
appetite.35
Chromolithograph advertisement for Aulsebrook’s Confectionery, Christchurch,
N.Z., ca. 1920s — Source.
 Photograph of a trade fair stall displaying confectionary goods by Browne
Brothers & Geddes, Auckland, 1930 — Source.

None of these alimentary examples involve eating: there is no giant to tuck into the metaphorical

England; the stuffed deer can never satisfy his good appetite; the child may resemble a sausage
but he is so thin he does not appear ever to have eaten one; Sabina's confections will remain

imprisoned in their packaging and a glove will prevent Viola from properly relishing the taste of
victory. Elsewhere, the spa-goers gorge themselves at regular intervals, but they do so seemingly

without gratification, as if food were a prescription for their bodies that did not involve their
brains. The detached narrative too is quite removed from the events it describes, with a brittle,

sardonic tone — the text can only record from a distance rather than really get embroiled in the
alimentary process. We are left by the kitchen window, looking in.
Mansfield came closer to finding an authentic voice in Bliss and Other Stories, but still no one
eats and the pieces are tied up in etiquette, often centring around formal teas and dinner parties.

In the title story, “Bliss”, food is everywhere, saturating thought and speech, and even evident in
self-consciously avant-garde clothing (nut earrings and dresses like banana skins). The

bohemians invited to Bertha's dinner party speak of plays entitled Love in False

Teeth and Stomach Trouble, a plan for a fried-fish interior design scheme, and a poem
called Table d'Hôte, which opens with the line: “Why must it always be tomato soup?”36 But this

gustatory discourse is unrelated to passion or animal urges; sliding along the surface of things, it

only proves their entanglement with the ephemeral and the inconsequential. Failing utterly to
comprehend the force of feeling that informs all meaningful art or to produce a “gut reaction” in

relation to it, these dilettante guests are cannibals feasting on each other’s hot air, as light as
the soufflé which will be served at the party. The fish will rot, the soup in the poem will go

rancid, but there will be another fad to replace it and the guests will have already turned away
before they can witness the decay. Bliss and Other Stories most often depicts characters too

entrapped by metropolitan intellectualism to know how to use their bodies and therefore eat.
Glass plate negative by Leslie Adkin of a group taking tea on the lawn, North
Island, N.Z., 1912 — Source.
 Gelatin silver negative by Roland Searle of a group eating ice cream cones, ca.
1925 — Source.

In The Garden Party collection, widely considered to contain some of Mansfield's most

accomplished work (with the fiction testifying to her pledge to create a kind of “special prose”
which would pay a “sacred debt” to her homeland), there is a marked shift.37 Here, important

moments of hope and freedom are enacted through snacking, taking place away from the

constriction of the dinner table and the falsity of etiquette or politesse. We have Laura in “The
Garden Party” biting at her bread and butter in the open air to show how much she prefers the

company of the workmen sent to erect the marquee to that of those she is expected to keep
company with. This is an act of rebellion which asserts her own individuality and allows her to

imagine transgressing those limits prescribed for her. In “Bank Holiday”, an almost cinematic
portrayal of a communal scene, the pleasure is more widespread, with convivial joy conveyed
largely through acts of outdoor eating. Ice creams, oranges, and bananas are consumed with glee,
with these individually-appreciated acts of consumption building into a carnivalesque mass

enjoyment. Eating here is part of the ebb and flow of vibrant, teeming, sensory life.
By using snacks, fast, and pre-prepared food as a vehicle to express these quiet but important

moments of change, of liberty and self-expression, Mansfield also revealed a shift in her literary
viewpoint. The author’s affiliation with the short story was as complicated as her relationship

with food, but by allowing characters to work towards authentic self-expression through
snacking, transgressing convention and expectation in favour of autonomous satisfaction, she

articulated a vision of a world in which the short story could survive, because its readers would
resemble her characters. It was only through admitting her divorce from more traditional literary

modes that Mansfield could provide both with the indulgence they craved and deserved.
Mansfield's strongest work enabled not transcendence, but embroilment with the materiality of

existence; an anti-aristocratic formulation of modernism where appetite was key. Here, a

piquant, shifting, comestible multiplicity of language leaves the reader entirely engaged, unlike

Mansfield after reading one of her husband's letters, writing: “It had somehow a flat taste—and I
felt rather as tho' I'd read it curiously apart”.38 Roland Barthes described Brillat-Savarin's

language as “literally gourmand, greedy for the words it wields and for the dishes to which it
refers”.39 Mansfield's texts too are “literally gourmand” — her best stories are delicacies made

up of desire, snacks for ineluctably modern appetites. When Mansfield vowed in her notebook,
“Yes, I want to write about my own country till I simply exhaust my store”, she could not have

known just how much she would give from its depth — piling the shelves of New Zealand's
literary larder giddily high and with improbable variety.40