Katherine Mansfield and the London Rain

The rain figures in Katherine Mansfield’s work not only as a quintessential characteristic of life in London but also as a liminal element that oscillates between visibility and indistinctness, blurring her urban women’s states of being. It exposes the vulnerably permeable and dissoluble alterity of the self and its boundaries. As a transient materialisation of the atmosphere, the rain generates feelings of alienation but also enables the merging of the self with the environment. Female characters’ experiences of rain present a fluid model of selfhood shaped by its capacity to be absorbed and revealed by the medium of the atmosphere. Women recede into the weather, turning into foggy characters at times of affective precariousness and intensity. As an atmospheric condition that allows a scene to be both still and in constant motion, the rain has a destabilising effect on feeling, perception, and visible reality, thus disrupting the knowability of the perceiving subject. Mansfield’s London women interact with the rainy weather in key moments when they momentarily slide out of definite conceptual outlines and perspectives. Paying attention to Mansfield’s representations of the rain affords us rich opportunities of reading her memorable depictions of female character as eroded and defined by their atmospheric embeddedness.