PLAN

 

INTRODUCTION

 

1. Witi Ihimaera rewriting Katherine Mansfield

1.1. The Maori concept

1.1.1. Maori/Pakeha

1.2. Witi Ihimaera: the writer back

1.2.1. Rewriting in Pakeha/Maori

1.2.2. Ihimaera “rewriting” Mansfield

1.2.3. Postcolonial rewriting

 

2. Space: Pakeah or Maori territory?

2.1. Woman and man’s Space

2.1.1. Family and relations in “The Woman at the Store/The Boy with the Camera”

2.1.2. Beauty of adolescence

2.1.3. The concept of education

2.2. The concept of landscape in “The garden party/This life is weary”

2.3. The biculturalism

2.3.1. Bicultural space

 

3. Human relations

3.1. Man-woman relation: betrayal and loss of happiness in “Bliss/Summons to Alexandra”

3.2. Social conditions: differences in social class in “The Garden Party/This Life is Weary”

3.3. Pakeha versus Maori way of life

3.3.1. “Her First Ball/His First Ball”: Maori and the self-discovery

3.3.2. “How Pearl Button was Kidnapped/The affectionate kidnappers”: Pakeha vs Maori

 

CONCLUSION

 

APPENDICES

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

 

A century behind Katherine Mansfield’s birth, Witi Ihimaera, a New Zealander novelist, short story writer, writes a collection of short stories that turn around her themes and enlighten them thanks to his Maori heritage and contemporary know-how.

“Maata”, a novel tells about Mansfield’s close amity with a Maori woman to whom she asked to complete what she had written about their relationship in New Zealand and England when they were young women, a true story as the protagonists really exists (Martha Grace Mahapuku). A Maori journalist investigates for “Maata” and the incomplete novel and makes it personal; the quest became as much a search for his own Maori roots as a piece of literary finding. This novel evokes Mansfield’s relationship with the colonial history and landscape of her native country, as well as her consciousness on the importance of the Maori people. Witi Ihimaera takes up this novel in his collection addressed to Mansfield Dear Miss Mansfield: A Tribute to Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp.

In this collection Ihimaera’s retells other famous short stories of Katherine Mansfield,  all of them have Maori characters like Tuta Wharepapa in “His First Ball” (Mansfield’s “Her first ball”), or the two Maori women who have been arrested for kidnapping in “The Affectionate Kidnappers” (Mansfield’s “How Pearl Button was Kidnapped”); they are no longer the generic “fat and laughing » stereotypes of Mansfield’s original, but two desperate and vulnerable women  who have « gone into darkness, gone into the stomach of the Pakhea… eaten up by the white man”.

These characters are ragged between the old Maori ways and the dominant Pakeha-European-culture. Ihimaera describes this unavoidable and irresolvable clash; however his Maori characters tend to be noble, wise, environmentally conscious and probably reflecting modern-day’s fashion. The other stories are quiet, domestic tales in which Maori and European alike scrutinize the rest of the world from the outside, with characters like the children in the distressing “This Life is Weary” (Mansfield’s “The Garden Party”) spending their Saturdays, hidden in the bushes, watching the activities of the lucky family that lives in “The Big House”.

Despite the fact that, some stories have echoes of Mansfield’s lyricism and look similar, the collection is rough in execution and ranges from the best to the ordinary. Probably, Mansfield never did more than drawing the novel,  but Ihimaera interest’ is to emphasize differences between Maori and Pakeha (European alike) thinking and explore New Zealand’s literary as well as cultural history through Maori eyes. Ihimaera pays homage to Mansfield’s art and life, instead of writing back to correct and reconstruct the story, he writes the stories again to celebrate them.

We can assume that Ihimaera imitates Mansfield literary voice and retells variously Mansfield stories, in other stories, from the viewpoint of Maori or working-class, recreating the New Zealand, where she was born, accepting her in his own Maori tradition.

Therefore the aim of this work is to compare some of the most known  Mansfield’s short stories (The Garden Party, Her Fist Ball, The Women at the Store, How Pearl Button was Kidnapped and Bliss) rewritten ​​by Ihimaera (This Life is Weary, His First Ball, The Boy with the Camera, The Affectionate Kidnappers, Summons to Alexandra).

We can say that it’s Ihimaera’s Maori look which dominates these rewritten tales. Through this comparison work, we intent to show how Ihimaera through the appropriation of these stories, explores the original themes and gives life to his Maoris’ characters through his Maori regard .

To this end, this work is divided into three parts: the first will cover the general concepts “Witi Ihimaera rewriting Katherine Mansfield”: the Maori concept its meaning and importance in  the New Zealand’s territory and the act of writing back, its relevance to postcolonials writers as Ihimaera.

The second part focus on space and how it is perceived in the short stories , a space that belongs to woman and man , that belongs to Maori and Pakhea, but that stills divided, creating a bicultural world that consequently needs to be shared. Space that woman and man occupied in society, as well as space shared by the colonized (Maori) and the colonizer (Pakeah) and the harshness of colonial life. Nature and landscape are also important themes, for both Mansfield and Ihimaera, their connection to this capital element and how they describe it trough their stories is also to  be compared in this second part.

Finally the third part will address the theme of human relations, another crucial theme in Mansfield’s universe, how were man-woman relation in colonial life, how Mansfield and Ihimaera treated themes as the loss of hapiness, the division of classes and the contrast of Maori and Pakeah life.

By comparing Mansfield’s short stories to those rewritten by Ihimaera we will try to demonstrate how relevant is the act of rewrite and by contrasting the different vision that these two authors lay down to their work, we hope understand the meaning of Maori values in a white dominant society, and its consequence to the changing vision of the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Witi Ihimaera rewriting Katherine Mansfield

 

Our work concerns the comparison of 5 short stories written by Katherine Mansfield and Witi Ihimaera, a contemporary writer. He made 5 rewriting among which 2 were born in New Zealand and, thus, shared their origin.

Unlike Mansfield who left New Zealand to live mostly in Europe at the age of fourteen, Ihimaera, as a proud patriot, stays in New Zealand and is the spokesman of the indigenous Maori people in New Zealand.

This pair of writers presents the different aspect of rewriting process other than we have already seen until now. For instance, Mansfield found that Ihimaera honors art and life by rewriting stories in order to revive its famousness instead of rewriting just to make some correction or to recreate the story like the case of Jean Rhys and his postcolonial response to Jane Eyre regarding the representation of Creole Bertha which is somewhat unfair.

Another one of the aspect of his rewriting of Mansfield’s work concerns a basic change of perspective to the extent that an indigenous Maori took the place of the original characters. In reality, Ihimaera felt that creating is, first of all, the way to overcome imperialism primarily that of Colombia, it is meant to teach Maori origin and history. The life of Mansfield fascinated both by the character art and this is what Ihimaera confesses in the introduction of the post-colonial response he wrote. Mansfield left a preliminary series of mysteries after her short life of complicated and extravagant woman as we knew. Katherine’s life is partly rewritten by Ihimaera in his works and this reason leads us to focus on them. Jean Rhys does not know Brontë while he implemented his writings which made them irrelevant whereas Ihimaera wrote dependently on his knowledge of Mansfield. Indeed, Ihimaera is more dependent on both the text and the life of Mansfield. That is to say, Ihimaera’s short stories would not have existed if it was not for Mansfield’s stories as their variations and dependence are obviously direct and explicit.

Ihimaera’s intertextuality is very strong in art as well as in his short stories with variations on Mansfield’s stories. The level of dependency and intertextuality is then more significant. Mansfield’s stories have a recognizable autobiographical element that rely them, notably in the character of Kass and his family members.

 

1.1. The Maori concept

 

The works of Maori writers have emerged as powerful political and literary commentary mainly in the last two decades.

There was a renaissance experienced by the Maori during this period in New Zealand, a renaissance featured by Maori who speak and practice politics, more and more aware of their artistic heritage and, most of all, what they create and experience in this heritage.

Talking about art in its general aspect, despite the success of the Te Maori exhibition in the United States in relationship with the triumphant return to New Zealand which constitutes a re-engagement with Maori secondary, Maori literature seems to be a mean which allows the reexamination of Maori culture which can result in revaluation or reaffirmation. The very important colonial legacy and Pakeha complicity in New Zealand have been carefully examined. Compliance with the spirit of the Maori renaissance in New Zealand combines indigenous perspective, including the concept of indigenous peoples’ increasing awareness and accumulation of the consequences of colonialism. Maori have entered New Zealand through literature within the last two decades and reached a national and an international audience at that time. That period is linked to the time when their political aspirations evolved and with the subsequent reconceptualization of the Maori-Pakeha relationship. In New Zealand, they consider literature as well as the Maori writing as so common, like a similar description of literary style and cleanliness characteristic of Maori in a worldview. Ihimaera’s point of view allows us to approach the insistence on difference which has a tendency to ignore the fiction’s ability to put the stress on questions of differentiation, originality and hybridity through the shape and function which is contrary to the common interpretation of fiction. In fact, the Maori’s space sovereignty and literature highlights its negotiation rather than the several linguistic meanings that its story contains along with a link between text and reality that is uneven as well as a definitive explanation.

 

1.1.1. Maori/Pakeha

 

There is an implication of a dualistic perspective of Maori and Pakeha cultures as culturally, socially and economically divided in Ihimaera’s image of “striding both worlds”, a viewpoint which is represented in the novel by the Waituhi and Wellington’s opposing poles. Tama is anchored by the birthright of whakapapa, genealogy to the Maori heritage embodied in Waituhi as well as its characters. On the other hand, The Pakeha world is described as exterior and is learned at school instead of being acquired in a natural way. It requires knowledge and skills in both Maori and Pakeha domains to be able to step over from one pole to the other. While not having the key to access Maori culture, the Pakeha couple drags nervously their feet at the gates to the marae for the tang, Tama plays the role of emissary who welcomes the move and makes them come over. That representative and educative function is also fulfilled by Ihimaera’s fiction of the 1970s, for first time, it describes Maoritanga to a Pakeha and international readership.

The Maori-Pakeha dynamics is used as an example to those who takes place in New Zealand society generally in a contemporaneous way. A reconsideration of race relations between the majority Pakeha and the indigenous Maori began in the 1970s; it is sparked by more and more pressure from Maori for recognition. This is manifested by a demand for political sovereignty and the revalorization of Maori culture, also called a Renaissance. With the establishment of official biculturalism engaging with the special place of Maori in New Zealand, there was a political and cultural sea change in the 1980s. This monumental shift in Maori-Pakeha relations was negotiated on all society levels and has been a long process that still remains till now.  As far as Maori is concerned, it was their literature that has been the instrument to express both the cultural flourishing of Maori Renaissance and the political demands of sovereignty. The depiction that Ihimaera feel for the cultural autonomy of precontact practices and values emphasizes the fact that Maori culture is unique and special, this validates the claim for political sovereignty, expressed as a kind of nationalism based on the struggle to assert fundamental differences and thereby rights to recognition. Indeed, Ihimaera’s early fiction serves as the basis of Maori literature in English being a recognized genre of New Zealand fiction, and its style and content keeps on being to be familiar in most of Maori writing in 2007.

There is a constancy in the position from which the writer particularly directs his or her narrative and it was put in one of Ihimaera’s interviews, writing by Maori is writing “from the inside out,” describing a Maori social, cultural and imaginative worldview[1].

From tentative beginnings in the 1960s and 1970s, with Ihimaera (first collection of short stories, first novel), Patricia Grace (first book of fiction by a Maori woman) and Hone Tuwhare (first Maori poet), the Maori writing’s publication from 1980 has been amazingly creative. In the path of Ihimaera’s earlier anthologies “Into the World of Light” (1982) and “Te Ao Marama”[2], the biennial Huia Publishers collections of short stories keeps on providing a forum dedicated to new Maori writers and for discussions to define Maori literature.

 

1.2. Witi Ihimaera: the writer back

 

Ihimaera wrote a tribute to Mansfield to commemorate the centenary of his birth. Ihimaera got New Zealanders admiration for his art, the initial letter of his book which points out the reasons of his decision to resume his stories. In response to the stories he wrote, Maori has called variations by addressing her as if she could still read the letter, as if she still needed to make some updates in the change in the New Zealand writings. The pride of the people can be read in the humble words Ihimaera uses to describe the progress of his country.

Ihimaera really praised his flourishing society, art and culture for these hundred years, though he is aware that New Zealand was too small for his genius. Nonetheless, the best inspirational stories related to New Zealand that he wrote during the time she spent there was appreciated. He said: “Miss Mansfield, New Zealand we have claimed proud of you because you are born and raised a New Zealander. (…) For our part, we have long recognized that New Zealand could not meet your expectations of life, art, literature and experience”.

He was himself surprised by his humble tone and the tone of the letter he addresses her regarding the greatness of the artist. The spokesman in the person of Ihimaera, which is another element, held a speech on behalf of all New Zealanders as if they were just one person: “it is the modern way, Miss Mansfield, for having taken so fascinated by your life with your stories. I myself have always wanted to write about your friend Maata Maori and why, if she was indeed possessed a novel you’ve written, it may have chosen not to separate. Romance “Maata” is my attempt to answer this question Maori, but the greater part of this collection, Miss Mansfield, a response also includes Maori, not life, but the stories”.

He repeatedly insists on the fact that this response is not of him but that of Maori. The characteristics of the post-colonial work are the element of post-colonial spokespersonships, the pride of its people, and also the ownership of Mansfield. Approaching the process of Ihimaera’s rewriting, he pays tribute to his art and it is only a detail but he calls this collection tribute. As we have repeatedly said, rewriting is first of all a critical act, and act cannot be apolitical. To this end, it is not only a matter of expressing admiration for the author to the art of Mansfield. Indeed, rewriting can be done either as a means of expressing honor, that is to say, rewriting contributes to a positive element in the artistic will of repetition, writing the story again, taking part in the admiration of the art, element resisting to negative. In other words, rewriting, in relation to written text that is against the reference to the place of honor, expresses a critical disapprobation and is politically motivated. We will argue that there is misleading and ambiguousness in the title chosen by Ihimaera for his book; it reflects its collection as both a tribute and a critical response. Ihimaera draws parallels between his own inspiration and that of Mansfield. “Dear Miss Mansfield, my overwhelming inspiration and purpose comes from my Maori forebears – they are my source as surely as New Zealand was yours” (Ihimaera 10). Ihimaera’s letter and his whole collection symbolizes a birthday present he humbly offers to Mansfield with the hope that she will enjoy it. The mentioned novella Maata^[3] follows the letter then come thirteen short stories that are his variations on Mansfield’s stories. Focusing on the novella Maata is important if one wants to analyze Ihimaera’s post-colonial response. There are actually two lines in the novella where the first one talks about the mark of unexplained existence of the Maata manuscript by studying Mansfield’s life and the second one follows the growing procedure of a Maori boy who seeks for identity among Maori. This narrates then a personal quest, a pilgrimage that undergoes several external determinants especially historical. The boy cannot cut himself from the past as a member of the indigenous people who suffer from colonization. This process of maturing has thus a link with that of decolonization. What makes the novel remarkable is its postmodern form where the appearance of events in important world and local in the story are the fragmented headlines, that confronts the reader with unfamiliar names, treatises, opportunity to go farther and, for himself, discover what do the names and events mean. These events are related to the character’s life and history, they produce element of self-reflection, since postmodern literary characteristics combined with biographical accounts complete reference source and witnesses and provide as well a documentary tool from historical events, such as a detective story. The general impression while reading the text is that it is very impressive and filled with historical and bibliographical details. Literally speaking, Ihimaera’s art is self-explanatory, making it easy to follow and to understand for the reader, inviting the latter to look for strange names in the titles in order to reconstruct the puzzle, searching to learn more. Moreover, this approach returns a very pedagogic approach, in accordance with its role as cultural activist.

Mahaki, the protagonist of the novel, does not adhere to its tribal culture despite its trials because he has naturally higher aspirations, encouraged by his mother, including reading, studies that represent most of the greatest achievements in the life. All members of the tribe are shearers, whose chief is Te Rangi, Mahaki’s father.

Mahaki’s natural inclination leads to conflict, prompting to teaching and journalism, while it is a shearer career that his tribal identity is assigned to. Consequently, a dilemma arises inside Mahaki: following his path and being excluded from his own tribe, or submitting to the tradition and repressing his discontent. Her mother said: “Forget the gang, my son. Be your own master”. Mahaki became a journalist at the end of his quest for identity, and he discovers, later, that the members of his tribe have always been proud of his choice.

1.2.1. Rewriting in Pakeha/Maori

 

Ihimaera’s extensive inter-reference was largely overlooked and received largely as an investigation of Pakeha-Maori race relation. There are more troubling aspects of the novel that attracts critics’ attention that is the accusatory tone that Ihimaera’s uses to address directly the reader “you Pakeha,” and the apparent plagiarism he uses from famous historical texts connected to his revisionist approach to the New Zealand land wars. Williams analyses the way that the Maori writer interpolates an emotional and angry response which not only challenges in one of the most careful examinations of Ihimaera’s copying of paragraphs from Keith Sorrenson’s entries in An Encyclopedia of New Zealand, but insults the Pakeha bias of colonial history, thus exaggerating the difference between the perception of Pakeha and Maori of the same events. The counter-discursive strategy of Ihimaera is a direct example of postcolonial “writing back,” which quite takes literally the Pakeha perspective of history and introduces his own commentary on it. The unacknowledged borrowings of Ihimaera, apart from Williams’s critic, and rectified later on in other editions, did not arouse excessive debate in the media or in literary circles. Whereas there was a heated debate around the possible plagiarism Jane Campion made of the novel of Jane Mander in her film in 1993, The Piano, or in an example of Australian literary work, Helen Demidenko’s The Hand that Signed the Paper, discussed further in chapter five. Among the most serious of “crimes” in literature is plagiarism. Real consequences in the legal implications of copyright infringement may be the result of its threat to key concepts of ownership, originality and authority. Even if Ihimaera’s plagiarism is pointed out by many critics, they generally contained it in his historiographical repositionings, so that his challenge to individual writers’ ownership was turned into a metaphorical challenge to Pakeha authority, which is considered as a common and acceptable feature of postcolonial “writing back.” Given the clemency with which people met Ihimaera’s misrepresentation, the New Zealand reception of his appropriation of Mansfield’s stories that comes three years later, was so hostile and it is rather surprising. Ihimaera redirects the question of plagiarism to one of outright rewriting in his collection of short story in 1989, Dear Miss Mansfield: A Tribute to Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp. It is that way that the Maori writer’s rewriting of Mansfield was received under the rubric of postcolonial “writing back”.

 

1.2.2. Ihimaera “rewriting” Mansfield

 

Ihimaera describes his motivation to “respond” by way of offering a “personal tribute to [her] life and [her] art in his introductory letter to “Miss Mansfield”. For Glage, Ihimaera “acknowledges [Mansfield’s] literary legacy and accepts her into his own tradition” in this statement. The comment Glage is typically postcolonial and in that, the canonical text and writer is integrated into the now centralized postcolonial position in order for Ihimaera to absorb Mansfield. However, Ihimaera shows a much more complex, mediating relationship to Mansfield than Glage allows for. He addresses personally and directly the earlier writer in the introduction to the collection, and again in a second letter in As Fair as New Zealand to Me, a collection of letters by New Zealand recipients of the Katherine Mansfield fellowship to Menton, France. In the latter letter, Ihimaera give way many of the gaps that exist between himself and Mansfield, gaps on which depends a reading of difference. He writes directly the letter to “Katerina” in the present tense, in a way that it seems she is still alive and is still able to correspond with him. His mentioning of the distance between Auckland and Menton signals that he knows the town well. He responds to her life there by aligning her views with his own, even including an opinion on the French and commiserating about bronchitis. The style of the letter is a mannerism of Mansfield, a feminizing coming across in Ihimaera’s case as camp, something he even overtly shows in his mentioning of the New Zealand gay scene. There is also a part where he narrates an anecdote about the local police mistaking him for an “Algerian gigolo” on the beach in Menton. Not only the tale laughs over the sexual implication of the episode but it also reveals something about how Ihimaera is with shifting truths and blurred identities. Still concerning ethnic confusion, Ihimaera tells a story about him being mistaken for an Ainu when he was in Japan, a cultural confusion that amuses him in (Peter Dowling).

In the second letter to Mansfield, Ihimaera takes pleasure in assuming different roles such as both a poseur and an imposter on the French Riviera. Such posturing draws out another link with Mansfield. Mansfield readers are reminded by Damien Wilkins about the fact that she also played with images of herself as exotic, dressing up as a gypsy, or in Arabian shawls or Japanese kimono, and it is also evident in the many derivatives of her name, including the Russian “Yekaterina” and “Katya.” This imitation spills over to her writing in the same way as Mansfield slips into the voice of other writers, including Oscar Wilde and Chekhov, Ihimaera influences Mansfield’s style, tone and voice.

In his second letter, Ihimaera is more intimate with Mansfield by giving her another nickname in the Maori “Katerina,” spelt, somewhere, “Kataraina”, that implies that they are speaking the same language, or to be more precise, that he speaks her language. An ironical distance in this stance inevitably exists; Ihimaera inflates it in showcase fashion, he recounts to his confidante the terrible reviews he had received for Dear Miss Mansfield. Ihimaera harmonizes his vision with that of Mansfield, his vision of life as of art. He asserts this way that his Maori perspective is consistent with and not different from that of Mansfield, as it is indicated in his citation of a Maori proverb which is considered as a kind of cultural translation of a statement of Mansfield. Ihimaera thinks he is writing along with his predecessor and not writing against her.

Here is certainly a misinterpretation of Mansfield from Ihimaera but a comment in the introduction to Dear Miss Mansfield proves that he intentionally does so: “[i]t is the modern way, Miss  Mansfield, for us to have become as much fascinated with your life as with  your stories”. Ihimaera offers his misreading alongside many others, including John Middleton Murry’s selective packaging of her stories and journals after her death, and Pakeha New Zealand’s appropriation of Mansfield as a national writer and icon of emergent Pakeha identity.

 

1.2.3. Postcolonial rewriting

 

The terrain on which contrastive analyses of rewriting are conducted has been altered by Postcolonial rewriting since an aesthetic reflection, presupposing an occupation of English literature into an internally cohesive field, does not allow writers to bring cultural and literary perspectives from the exterior. Postcolonial rewriting critics have a tendency to try to find the aspects of the text that weaken cultural and literary authority of its predecessor’s within the politics of “writing back,” this tendency is opposed by Huggan and Appiah who insist on the the fact that there is a need to acknowledge all cultural and literary input. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is one of those who intend to deconstruct an imperial perspective in key texts reading, it is seen in the centering of the mad Bertha Rochester of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock, in which Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness where there is a multiple times re-enacting of the journey to the interior until a Creole imaginary assimilates and find the South American jungle natural. It is in this optic of imaginative historiography, which means challenging fiction rather than history, that commentaries on Dear Miss Mansfield argue that Ihimaera centralizes the barely discernible Maori and New Zealand referents of Mansfield’s stories.

It is difficult for postcolonial studies to cope with the other possibility of comparative readings; it is seen in the noting of similarities with the earlier text. Even if it is agreed by many critics that postcolonial writers integrate into their work elements of the English canon that are the rules of fiction and the novel form, they keep on insisting that the necessarily different focus of postcolonial writing back means a subversion of the English elements which often results in irony and parody of the English canon’s stylistic, structural and linguistic content. Many postcolonial critics avoid looking for similarities with English literature because it would mean that they are assuming that marginalized writers simply use European forms to describe non-European content, an attitude which supports Eurocentric paradigms[4]. Eurocentrism is implied in the way of countering this; the idea is confronted by Arun Mukherjee saying that postcolonial writers are mainly aiming to writing “back” to the West. She claims a plurality of motivations, positions and intended audiences for postcolonial writers as part of her highly critical stance towards the tendency that post-colonialism contains and accounts for all indigenous, minority, third world and settler society texts within the same unitary grouping. Mukherjee asserts that only one modality, one discursive position is left with this centre-margin binary thinking. According to her, they are bound to always ask questions about European discourses, of only one particular kind, those that are degrading and denying our humanity. She asserts to desire to respond that their cultural productions were created in response to their own needs and they have many more needs than constantly to ‘parody’ the imperialists.

The questions of audience as well as those of the canonical or colonial texts chosen for rewriting are both pertinent to a study of Dear Miss Mansfield, benefiting from the overreading of its similarities with Mansfield to emphasize the important influence that her work has on Ihimaera. Unlike the a binary logic that Mukherjee imagines that writers only choose to rewrite parts of canonical literature that “degrade and deny” minority agency, the collection of Ihimaera begins with the positive intention to celebrate Mansfield’s accomplishment, to pay her a “homage” and to thank her.

 

2. Space: Pakeah or Maori territory?

 

The 1970s marked the beginning of a reconsideration of race relations between the majority Pakeha and the indigenous Maori, sparked by increasing pressure from Maori for recognition, manifested in a demand for political sovereignty and the revalorization of Maori culture, termed a Renaissance. In the 1980s, a political and cultural sea change occurred, with the establishment of official biculturalism engaging with the special place of Maori in New Zealand. Negotiating the terms of this monumental shift in Maori-Pakeha relations, on all levels of society, has been a long process that continues to the present day.  As a yardstick for Maori concerns, Maori literature has been instrumental in expressing both the Maori Renaissance cultural flourishing and the political demands of sovereignty.

 

2.1. Woman and man’s Space

 

The movements of Maori sovereignty and renaissance have harnessed the structures of European modernity, nation-building, and, more recently, Western global capitalism, transculturation, and diaspora. Those contexts contest bicultural identity in New Zealand, and encourage Maori in the expression of their difference and self-sufficiency. Ihimaera’s fiction has been largely viewed as embodying the specific values of Maori renaissance and biculturalism. Nevertheless, Ihimaera is indebted to a wider range of literary influences than national literary critique accounts for in his techniques, modes, and themes. Literary negotiation of Maori sovereign space takes place in its forms rather than in its content in revealing a wide range of cultural and aesthetic influences and inter-references that are commonly seen to be fairly irrelevant to contemporary Maori literature. The uniqueness of Maori literature is expressed in the way of its using of the common tools of literary fiction: language, imagery, the text’s relationship to reality, including man/woman relation, and the function of characterization.

 

2.1.1. Family and relations in “The Woman at the Store/The Boy with the Camera”

 

Mansfield’s “The woman at the store”[5] explores the gender-related behavior and finds expression in the harsh landscape of New Zealand, her own home island. “The woman at the store” is set amidst the heat and dust of a lonely, semi-deserted ranch. The impersonal title of the “woman” confines her identity and is objectively portrayed. The narrator conveys the details of woman’s life through her eyes, and is not forthcoming at stake, as repeated attacks of an emotional nature drive her beyond hysterical madness to murder her husband who willfully and deliberately breaks her spirit, destroys her looks and operates as the nominal head of the home, but with regular and cruel departures from home. The symbolic effect of the approaching masculine presence is seen in the prefigured actual heat from the sun that is once more become part of the homestead, it is seen in the part where one of the travelers takes up with the woman, and sets the inexorable cycle of trust and abuse in motion again.

Jo, Jim and the narrator are riding horses, then they stop at a store where Jim went four years ago, joking that a blue-eyed blonde lives there. There they are greeted by a woman who appears to be mentally unstable and disheveled with missing teeth. They get an embrocating from the store to treat a wound on the horse, they ask her if they can stay in the nearby field at first she declines then she agrees she later suggests giving them dinner and at the part she eventually lets them stay for the night in the store. Jo and Jim joke about the woman referring to how she knows ‘how to kiss one hundred and twenty-five different ways’. The Narrator bathes in the river. They discover that the woman has attempted to make herself look pretty by putting on rouge and a different dress. Jo has combed back his hair, shaved, and changed. They start to get drunk and Jo and The Woman start “kissing feet” under the table, slowly growing closer as they get more intoxicated. The Woman’s daughter claims to be drawing a nude picture of the Narrator, saying she watched her bathing earlier. The Narrator is unsettled but the picture is not revealed. As she gets more drunk The Woman reveals that her husband often beats her, forces sex on her, goes away often shearing for months at a time and that she is alone and isolated living in poverty. She then leaves and comes back and then goes off again. Her daughter threatens to draw the picture she’s not allowed to and gets a smack and a stern warning from her mother. Jim and the Narrator stay in the store room with The Woman’s daughter. She then does a drawing of a woman pointing a gun at a man and a picture of a grave, intimating that her mother killed her father. Jim and the Narrator see the drawing, stay up all night in shock and then leave in the morning without Jo who has spent the night in The Woman’s bed.

One of masculine characters appears on the horizon as a rider covered in dust with “[w]isps of white hair |that] straggled from under his wide-awake, his moustache and eyebrows were called white, he slouched in the saddle, grunting. The woman found by the travelers at the ranch is a figure of fun to the extent that only the modicum of a sense of self-esteem has not been destroyed by the circumstances of her life, and the lack of authenticity that results from such a sense of worthlessness. There is a reflection of the power struggle between the woman and her husband and the recollection of her lifestyle in the woman’s lost looks. It takes on tangible proportions as her authenticity and her self-esteem are corroded by the effect of the commanding presence of his voice alone, and that destroys any hope that she may have of establishing her own voice. Such oppression is initially internalized as passivity and manifested as hysterical symptoms common to such suppression of emotion, but then transferred to action as she resorts to the use of the rifle, and fires the gunshot that kills her husband.

 

In “The boy with the camera”[6], Ihimaera creates a context that is totally Pakeha, in which Maori calls the house a “whare”. The story is about a woman living in a motel alone with her son and having been deserted by her husband, from the other side of the country. A firm had noted that the city was connected by the highway with a fabulous mountain resort three hundred miles away. Actually, the road is used only by curious people who did it once and never again, the large service trucks taking plant to and from the resort, and itinerant Maori workers with nowhere to go. The woman in the story had worked in an upmarket bar in the city. At that time, she was very pretty and popular among the local clientele with her figure and lascivious nature. Then in her early thirties she longed for marriage, then get married and had a son, then began a constant state of fighting. As her husband would disappear for nights on end, she decided to revenge with indulging in small infidelities. She was careless and that was when the beatings began, and finally she ended up being a woman who looks like a hungry bird, a thing of sticks and wires, chipped teeth and red pulpy hands, with a son which followed his mother everywhere because he adored her so.

Indeed, at the time when the motel was on his success, in the initial months, the woman and her husband were the happiest they had ever been. In the mornings the woman would service the motel units and put the coffee on. Her husband would sit out front and if there was a customer, check him out. The woman would then make breakfast for her husband and son, and then give the boy his morning school lessons, the motel being too far away from any school. Around lunchtime there were bound to be people stopping for coffee, so the woman would doll herself up, put on a cute little apron, a remnant of her days as a hostess at the bar, and make the customers feel right at home. She flirted a little, but at that stage it was, “Sure you can see and feel but you can’t take a bite, honey”. Then in the afternoon the husband would take a nap or read a maga­zine and the woman would take the boy through his lessons again. The only thorn in her side was the boy, her son, who persisted in following her everywhere. No matter where she went, she felt she was never alone. The boy was always there. It was not his fault, of course, but she began to feel paranoid about him. “Why don’t you do something? She would scream. Go somewhere! Get out from under my feet! Give me some space, let me breathe, make me free, do anything but just go”. With the passing of a salesman, the woman bought her son a camera, and the boy became camera-mad. He took photographs of his mother, her friends, the passing cars, his mother, the truckers, the larks, the motel guests, his mother, the plains, the pond, his mother, his mother, his mother. One of the truckers gave the boy lessons and saw the wonder on the boy’s face when he developed his first photograph. But the boy knew that his mother did not mean it and that she loved him. Anyway, two years is a long time in the life of a boy. The body strengthens and thickens, stubble grows on the chin, the voice deepens and nocturnal fantasies are accompanied by strong surges of desire. All these symptoms of manhood descended on the boy, and the woman knew he must leave. She wrote to a brother from whom she had been estranged many years, asking if he would take her son in. A month later she received a reply saying that she should send her son for a holiday, if that worked out okay, then perhaps the boy could stay. When the woman told her son he thought he was leaving her forever, he began to wise and pleads with her and, for the first time in her life, she struck him.

The version of Mansfield is adopted by Ihimaera as he feels it is compatible with his own artistic vision and position in New Zealand society. The way that he legitimizes his right to speak as a Maori is not the same as the close personal connection that he creates with her. His relationship with Mansfield is chosen while his whakapapa, genealogy, gives him an innate right to speak as Maori. This theory of chosen affiliation given as an example here sidesteps the hierarchical relationship implicit in organic filiations. It is meaningful to maintain echoes of familial connection which makes affiliation more than a postmodern, indiscriminate, picking and choosing of literary influences, and more a kind of adopting into the family, of collecting writers and texts.

 

It is seen here that there is an imitation of Ihimaera of Mansfield’s literary voice and retells variously Mansfield stories according to the viewpoint of Maori by recreating the New Zealand and introducing her in his own Maori tradition. “The woman at the store” in Mansfield’s story portrays colonial life at his worst. The New Zealand stories avoid sentimentality in their candid portrayal of family relationships, social pretentions, and class distinctions though it is the labour of memory, images of nineteenth-century colonial life as played out by a successful, business-oriented family may also clearly presented in these stories.

 

2.1.2. Beauty of adolescence

 

“Her First Ball”[7] portrays Leila, a naive, young country girl, who met a cynical old man at her first dance in town. Here, we are once again led to be aware of the author’s sensitivity to suffering. This awareness reaches out to the reader in symbolic form calling for his ability to read and understand the signs. This entire story centers on a jet of gas. The reader faces this image in the midst of last-minute dressing-room preparations for the dance. “A great quivering jet of gas lighted the ladies’ room. It wouldn’t wait; it was dancing already. When the door opened again and there came a burst of tuning from the drill hall, it leaped almost to the ceiling”. But the picture is quickly turned into the picture of an adolescent girl, Leila who is the jet of gas. The gas symbolizes the happiness of life in youth. The speed filling the life of the young is described by the word « jet ». Just as the flame leaps alternately from a tiny, minute light to a long bright blaze, likewise Leila’s emotions oscillate from mountain top to valley with adolescent speed. The same as Leila, the flame is very impatient; it jumps to the ceiling and Leila’s joy is not easy to contain, “And the rush of longing was changed to a rush of joy so sweet that it was hard to bear along”[8]. While the reader views the jet of gas “quivering”, he sees at the same time Leila clutching her fan, gazing at the dance hall, holding her breath and murmuring, “How heavenly; how simply heavenly”.

What is analysed is Leila’s suffering from the confusion of the young, the bewilderment of adolescent bliss, and Miss Mansfield describing the jet of gas, for the reader, this period of youth. It is somehow a sympathetic diagnosis. The author’s devoted sensitivity to the pain that one endured when looking at the world expectantly because of her deep zestful enjoyment of living is sensed by the reader.  Leila is an ordinary child, a symbol of the happiness of youth, but she has been isolated from the injustice of the social adult, and just as the jet of gas was at times very low, so too when Leila encounters the bald-headed man she feels depressed; she wants to stop the dance, “But deep inside her a little girl threw her pinafore over her head and sobbed. Why has he spoiled it all?”

This bald-headed man symbolizes age and its sorrows, he tries to find youth again through the dance whereas for Leila, the dance is life. She is considered as a beginner in this kind of living and ignored the true significance of just being. She complains when she discovers that mortality means death, « Oh, how quickly things changed! Why didn’t happiness last forever?”[9]

For this adolescent the ball symbolizes human life, but she wants only its delights. When Leila does not want to dance any more she is a credible character. She has been shocked into reality she cannot understand due to her innocence, and from which she flees in order to forget. Leila is the embodiment of the values Miss Mansfield wished to convey through this story. She continues to dance as the jet of gas dances. She was thrown in a trivial and foolish society where one must pay the price to enter it, something Leila does not choose to do. Instead, she abandons herself to the charm, magic, and unreality of the ball. At the end of the story, her mood is the same as it was at the beginning, being the quivering jet of gas suffering from the disease of adolescent bliss.

The real epiphany of the story continues from the jet of gas. It will keep on its dance as long as it is fed with more fuel. Then its light will continue to grow. In the same manner, if Leila were to continue to face reality she would continue to grow. But Leila speedily returns to her first delight, “And when her next partner bumped her into the fat man and he said, “Pardon”, she smiled at him more radiantly than ever. She didn’t even recognize him again”. When Katherine Mansfield has Leila postponing her facing up life in all its states, including death, Miss Mansfield’s cry against the corruption of an adult society requiring pretence and injustice as the price of belonging can almost be heard by the reader.

 

In “His first ball” Ihimaera is talking about that adolescence. Ihimaera’s narrative response to the original Her First Ball, by Katherine Mansfield is seen in “His First Ball”, from Dear Miss Mansfield’s thirteen stories, which is not in any way related to Maori peoples’ culture, but possibly, unknowingly, to a modern Maori society. His First Ball used seemingly perfect colloquial language while the language in Mansfield’s uses that of aristocratic British. Coral, Tuta Wharepapa’s mother, teases a great deal in his son having received this mystery letter in an envelope bearing a very imposing insignia of the government house, “Oh, tutu, if you ore gooing pahst government howse please convay may regards to…and then laughed”.Tuta Wharepapa is a factory worker invited to a ball (like Mansfield’s Leila) at Government House, to represent the workers at his factory. He becomes Eliza to Mrs Simmons’ Professor Higgins in the crash course she gives him in Pakeha etiquette. On the night, he is patronised, renamed “Mr Tutae Tockypocka” or “Mr Horrynotta” by the “flash people”. Finally, with the help of Joyce, another outsider hiding behind a large fern, he realises that if he ‘could not join them.., then, yes, he could beat them’ by dancing to his own steps. Thus, a false journey is rejected, with the realisation of his true direction. Satire, even comic caricature, gives the writing a light touch absent from Stewart’s angry character that is quite willing to disrupt the polite congregation by throwing his clothes amongst them. Tuta and Joyce instead take to the floor for another dance, which is much less disruptive.

In this visionary mode, a social contrast to the realism of Ihimaera is marked. In danger of ‘growing up proper little Pakehas’, children now learn to live more communally with their cousins until Tama feels a ‘growing sense of belonging’. The truth is veiled from the children by the elders, who talk in Maori or in whispers because they “don’t want to upset the mokos”. His passage from childhood innocence to adult experience is filled with images of an older, threatened order which he will never forget. The travelling hero of Ihimaera is not himself cast in the mould of confrontations and battles with stags or city council, and he returns to the warmth of his family. The dragons seem to have been too much for the elders, though the young ones are storing images in readiness for whatever it is that will come. The resultant tone is elegiac rather than confrontational.

 

2.1.3. The concept of education

 

“The garden party”[10] begins in an optimistic mood, though, with a scene of conspicuous consumption abundant with “good things to eat, lovely things to wear, wonderful expensive flowers to enjoy”[11] while the rich Sheridans are making the final preparations for a garden party that will take place that afternoon in their imposing beautiful house located on a hill. However, one should be careful not be misled by this grand opening and the illusory title. The work of fiction under consideration here concentrates on, and only on Laura, one of the four offspring of the Sheridan family, and as with all the other occurrences constituting the action, the garden party assumes significance only in relation to Laura. Laura is the overriding presence in “The Garden Party.” She is the central character, the narrator, and the reflector, namely the central consciousness in it, as Mansfield constantly “goes in and out of her [character’s mind]”[12] and portrays the external objective world the way it appears in Laura’s very private and subjective world.

Before anything else, entering the consciousness of her subject allows the writer to reflect how important the preparations of the party are for Laura. In Magalaner’s[13] phrase, Laura’s “first grown-up affair”, the preparations shows their creation of the “opportunity” for her to put the theoretical education she got from her elders in practice. As a general rule, Victorian women had to learn and practice “to give orders to servants [. . .]; to be excellent at nurturing children and at social arts like arranging flowers, giving parties, and choosing hats, and were supposed to go through a little education: music, literature and languages, just to make them accomplished ladies”[14]. Consequently, Laura, qualified as a girl child, the signifier having an ideologically charged meaning, underwent a process whose aim is to make a “perfect wife, perfect mother and perfect housekeeper, the three requirements to make an ideal woman” of her. In other words, she has been in the process of forming a self, or what Burgan[15] calls “a usable identity”, and little by little that self has been molded into the socially prescribed shape. This type of education has a long history in bolstering the patriarchal ideological system outright. Her mother seems to have gone through the same stages, conditioning her to think like men, identifying her with their world view, not only accepting but also internalizing their values, and support the system legitimating the interests of the dominant group. It is now Laura’s turn to grow into a weakened woman who has as subjectivity a collective phenomenon instead of being specific to her and shaped by the forces in society. She must follow in her mother’s path in the mind of those driven by the same social outlook and customs, which eventually protects patriarchy, whether everyone realizes it or not.

The doctrine of the aforementioned education, contrary to expectation, since facilitated by a psychological factor that contributes to the construction of a self-image, may not always be too difficult to tolerate. There is perhaps a daughter’s will to stick on to the confines of bourgeois traditions and conformity as it is already in her nature or innate inclination to be a copy of her mother, which can be accounted for with reference to “the mirror stage in identity formation [that] designates the mother’s face as the child’s first reflection”. “When the average girl studies her face in the mirror”, writes D.W. Winnicott, “she is reassuring herself that the mother- image is there and that the mother can see her and that the other is en rapport with her”. Being the copy of her mother, the daughter is playing a role, a theme which occurs over and over again in Mansfield’s writings, according to Smith[16]. At the beginning of “The Garden Party,” Laura tries to imitate her mother as a role model, or, to use the term in social psychology, her “significant other,” who is a woman conceded a position in the household by the one/s in real control of the affairs, a strategy to integrate an oppositional or potentially oppositional individual into the system so that she would raise no objection to the preservation of the status quo. Laura attempts to arrange things by giving a few directions to the people around whom she felt she could reasonably assume would love obeying.

However, she loses face while trying to practice the restricted authority descending from her mother. Her first words to a group of workmen commissioned to put up a marquee in the garden are “Good morning”, but this simple greeting, as she mimics “her mother’s voice”, sounds “so fearfully affected that she [is] ashamed. Why exactly this emotion overcomes her is an explicit ellipsis omitting a detail in the narrative series, and denied that piece of information known to no one other than the narrator, the reader is justified to hold the opinion that she must be ashamed at sounding unconvincing. Much the same as many of Mansfield’s other female characters who are, in Cooke’s[17] point of view, nothing but ventriloquists articulating “the restrictive ideological mores of their social climate or the authority figures in their lives”, Laura, in this scene, speaks with someone else’s voice. However, her talents in ventriloquism, as she herself too recognizes on the instant, have distinct limits. What is worse, even if she had been a talented “ventriloquist,” nobody would have cared about her anyway. The ironic truth is that while assigned to control the affair, Laura is not needed there. The workmen already know where to erect the marquee, namely “somewhere where it’ll give you a bang slap in the eye”, and therefore neither pay attention to her suggestions nor treat her as a matron. Giving directions to the wrong people in the wrong way, Laura talks as if in the absence of a human target although her enunciation actually has an addressee. Reduced to an idle onlooker, she realizes that her “power” over servants in the home is superfluous, or rather a sham, which leaves her feeling slighted and wounded.

 

An important part that helps children grow into healthy adults is played by parenting and role models. Children copy people in their environment by observing them and then develop mannerisms along with their interactions. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” this saying is an accurate analogy regarding people and how they compare to their parents.   It suggests that apples, in this case, the children are relatively similar to where they came from that is to say their parents.   In Witi Ihimaera’s “This Life is Weary,” Celia has a strong sense of self and retains her innocence as a child because of positive influence from her parents.   In Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party,” Laura battles an on-going internal conflict regarding sense of self and struggles to maintain her compassionate nature because of negligent parents. Celia’s father, Jack Scott, was a loving father who strongly cared for his children.   The families’ happiness was his first priority unlike Mr. Sheridan who does not provide adequate parental care for his daughter Laura and is often absent from family interactions.  When parents offer love and support to their children, the latter are mentally healthy.   Celia worshipped her father. She thought: “he was the most wonderful, most handsome, most perfect man in the whole world”.   She even said: “I shall marry someone just like you,” to her father.   Celia had good reason to love her father as  Jack Scott supported almost any new activity the children wanted to do, like the Saturday’s they would spend at “The Big House”.   Even when the children would “become filled to the brim about the goings on up there [The Big House],” Mr. Scott would still retain his wise mannerisms and remind them “We are all equal in the sight of God”…

The family is a vital institution whether happy or dreadful. It is the primary social unit in any community and represents the individual’s opening into the wider social network. As the first locus of development, the family provides nourishment to the individual and sets the conditions of growth. Confronted with the individual’s desire for independence and growth, the family may be metaphorically seen as a closed door or an open door; as a prison or a gateway to freedom.

The family fulfils an important function, transmitting and mediating the memories, mores, and myths of the preceding generations and the community. Rituals, customs, spirituality,

morality and religion all have their place within the family structure, themselves forming family fictions of a unique and, most often, communal nature. The family and its fictions thus form the links in the chain between the past and the present and the future, in an ongoing narrative of both individualistic concerns and pursuits, but also, and perhaps more importantly, of the larger interests on the community and social environment (e.g. the extended family, clan, or tribe).

As a literary theme, therefore, the family offers a fascinating and complex area of research. The theme of the family is particularly rich and diversified in contemporary postcolonial literatures in English. As the locus of tradition, the family in these literatures may be explored as the place where the core values of the preceding generations and the ancestors are transmitted and lived, in order to ensure the continuity and growth. The family, as reflector and indicator of social change, also offers a wide area of research for themes of conflict and reconciliation.

In this period, the child is a benign and regenerative figure in the earlier works, with its magical qualities used to intensify its role in a redemptive progression towards the reform of social structures depicted as damaging of cultural and environmental heritage. Later in the period, there is a decrease of the regenerative possibilities offered by the child, as a diversification in the relationship between the individual child and adult society. Where a clear adult/child dichotomy in the early works renders the child as essentially positive and life-giving, the later, more complex field renders the child as less symbolically powerful, more individually threatening and less physically and characteristically distinct from the adult. Witi Ihimaera’s “This life is weary” considers this context of the history of the child character in literature, and particularly of the thematic traditions surrounding child characters throughout twentieth century New Zealand literature. The simultaneous vitality and vulnerability feature of the child figure, and the transcendent qualities of the magical child, are found to be critical to its construction.

 

2.2. The concept of landscape in “The garden party/This life is weary”

 

The role that land plays in society appeared as one of the most important contemporary aspects of the land issue in New Zealand, at least for the members of the Maori community involved in active protest. The meaning of land, the spiritual attachment Maoris has for their land, has become one of the consistent themes of the Maori land movement. Land provided a place of origin, a place in which to live, a territory possibly defending and a source of subsistence[18] according to the preliminary contact Maori.

 

There is both a literal and a symbolical value in the place in fiction and serves both geographical and metaphorical ends[19]. Mansfield made use of fixed associations of the garden and the road to portray certain kinds of experiences and made use of the small spaces which facilitated change and progression. Unity between place and characters are shown in the way Mansfield employed symbols and images. The garden has a double function in this context, both a real and a symbolic place. It symbolizes at the same time the Garden of Eden, a strictly archetypal place with specific characteristics. As for Hankin, it also has a likeness with Mansfield’s childhood home in Tinakori Road as she remembered it[20].

Other objects are imbued with symbolic significance in “The Garden Party” while the sea, the fuchsia bush, the flowers on the manuka tree and the window-sill are central symbols. The garden, road, lilies, Laura’s hat and the pervasive contrast between light and darkness, up above and down below all have a symbolic significance tightly linked to Laura’s development as a character.   The garden as archetypal image will receive attention in due course, but first we may establish its symbolic quality apart from its function as archetype. The garden is a symbol of life, development and natural growth. It signifies “a growing into maturity”, but also the inevitable withering of flowers and plants. As a parallel to life itself, the garden party set during one single day is “the brief moment men enjoy between cradle and grave”.

The luxuriance of the garden and the descriptions of the vibrant flowers at their prime suggest life and fertility opposing the motif of death which is introduced later in the story. But most importantly, the garden symbolizes social class. The isolation of the garden suggests wealth, as the Sheridans are able to adorn some elements and exclude others. The walls of the garden and its closed gate enable them to ignore the alternative reality outside the gate, and to invite only the people they want to include on the exclusive inside. In other words, for the Sheridans, it is the perfect place to celebrate their social status and exhibit their material success. On this particular occasion, vast amounts of flowers are used to display this success. The lilies signify showiness because it is the garden plant which grows highest[21].

This fits well with Mrs. Sheridan’s motivation for ordering an abundance of lilies and placing them where they will be seen:  “I was passing the shop yesterday, and I saw them in the window. And I suddenly thought for once in my life I shall have enough canna lilies. The garden-party will be a good excuse”. […] “Bank them up, just inside the door, on both sides of the porch, Please”, said Mrs. Sheridan.

Canna lilies; the kind of lilies Mrs Sheridan ordered from the florist, usually come in shades of pink or red. In the story, the canna lilies are “big pink flowers, wide open, radiant, and almost frighteningly alive”, which reflect the energy, life and vividness symptomatic of the Sheridan household. However, the lilies Laura wishes to bring to the cottages are white arum lilies. Traditionally, in a European context, white lilies signified purity, chastity and heavenly bliss, often called “the flower of paradise”.

This is in line with the ancient quality of the garden as well as Laura’s initial purity and innocence before she leaves the garden to face an alternative reality and the corruption of death. Lilies are also a sign of death, grief and sorrow as they are often used in funerals.

There is therefore no coincidence in the fact that Mrs. Sheridan advises Laura to bring lilies to the widow instead of any of the other flowers from the garden. Laura does not bring the lilies at last. As Jose point out, they will “ruin her lace frock”. Even if Laura does not bring the lilies to the cottages, their symbolic meaning of purity and innocence still qualify her. For to Sam Hynes, the flower imagery in Mansfield’s stories that are recurrent fits the theme of lost innocence and draws a parallel between the innocence of childhood and the beautiful, delicate and transitory flowers. Laura’s hat symbolizes her social class and the fact that it is black is far from irrelevant. Black is the colour of death and grief, and that is why it is fitting that Laura wears this particular hat when she goes to see the widow. But she put it on before the party, even before she heard of the death of her neighbour. In this way, the black hat predicts the death of the neighbour and represents something which is unfamiliar to the cheerful atmosphere in the garden. However, the gold daisy ornament serves as a connection to the garden which represents vanity, extravagance and artificial cultivation. It also a way of making the hat more elegant, perpetuating the female elegance portrayed in the story. It is meant to highlight the difference between the garden and the cottages[22].

 

There is an extrapolation of a Maori sense of place from the marae “heart” into the global domain when Ihimaera claims, in his comment about New York as a Maori world, that “the whole world is our turangawaewae now”. This Maori identity over and above any other is privileged in his conception of international movement as carrying over the “heart” of Maori culture into a foreign context privileges and it is seen in the fact that in New York, Ihimaera keeps a Maori worldview rather than fits in with the local culture(s). Both responses to global movement are possible, the transferring of “home” culture to the new setting, and/or assimilating to that new cultural context. It considers the applicability and difficulty of reconciling both discourses of diaspora and indigeneity in the following chapter. The local and global theories correspond to that of Ihimaera’s interpretation of New York, tracing the attachment that a Maori cultural perspective has towards foreign places. Thus, in “This life is weary”, the main characters are still much grounded in Maori culture, both traditional, in the Sheridan family. This deep connection to Maoritanga determines the responses to other cultures of these characters.  Unlike the expectation of the readers who are familiar with Ihimaera’s work, the writer does not portray an uneasy juxtaposition between the rapacious corporate capitalism of the “global village”, twenty-four-hour news industry, and a fiercely guarded, locally centered Maori identity. For instance, there are none of the ritualized moments of asserting Maoritanga, such as performing haka and karanga, or evoking Maori symbols, legends or imagery of the type that are integral to Celia’s expression of their Maori identities in “This life is weary”. Actually, “The Big House” is for Celia a different universe where she discovers the beauty, the new, the unknown, and returns to the identity concept. Indeed, this change of universe raises the concepts of identity and landscape that are closely related to Maori but this also talks about cultural adoption. The translation of both cultural and linguistic specificity assumes a desire to find common ground between cultures, worldviews and philosophies. This harmonizes Celia’s outward-looking culture of Sheridan’s family, of which the basic assumptions include heterogeneity, networks, diffusion, translation and, may be adoption. However, at the same time as outward-looking culture fixes its horizons away from its local setting, including her family’s culture. The question of modernity could be also raised, insofar as the integration of Celia and her adaptation to Sheridan life underlines the notion of acceptance of modernity. “This life is weary” calls on pre-modern Maori traditions based on notions of tapu, mana, as regards to this pattern and a natural mysticism that sets Maori apart from the Western modernity of the Pakeha present, in which social experience is no longer structured by sacredness.

A positive way for an indigenous adaptation to modernity is argued by Ihimaera’s interpretation of indigenous symbolism in a foreign context, the same for his non-traditional family structure. These aspects strengthen the novel’s attitude towards Maori culture and identity as comfortable with changing circumstances, rather than as threatened by forced adaptation even if the lyric novel does not openly describe the antagonism of 1980s emergent biculturalism, or reflect Ihimaera’s own unconventional lifestyle. Ihimaera’s Maori worldview transcends both spatial and temporal divides. To recognize that modernity is already inherent in Maori culture is to accept that the culture has a role to play in the contemporary national and international arena outside of the traditionalist and essentialist displays of preliminary contact authenticity that during cites as problematically locking Maoritanga into a non-modern primitiveness.

2.3. The biculturalism

 

The Maori are the native or indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand. Their arrival in New Zealand is situated somewhere before 1300 CE, they come from eastern Polynesia in several waves. The Maori developed a unique culture with their own language, a rich mythology, distinctive crafts and performing arts over several centuries of isolation. Their society is a tribal society based on East Polynesian social customs and organisation. Horticulture flourished using plants they introduced, and after about 1450, there was an emergence of a prominent warrior culture.

The Maori way of life knew great changes with the arrival of Europeans to New Zealand starting from the 17th century. Many aspects of Western society and culture were increasingly adopted by Maori people. Initial relations between Maori and Europeans were largely harmonious; the two cultures coexisted as part of a new British colony with the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. However, in the 1860s, rising tensions over land sales led to conflict. Social upheaval, decades of conflict and epidemics of disease took a devastating toll on the Maori population. The recovery began by the start of the 20th century for the Maori population, and efforts were made to increase their standing in wider New Zealand society. A marked Maori cultural revival gathered pace in the 1960s and still remains.

 

2.3.1. Bicultural space

 

English customs tended to be transplanted by settlers in British colonies to a foreign location. There is a hegemonic cultural discourse of the English upper middle class that is openly expressed in “The Garden Party”, it is shown through mannerisms, language, social decorum and the emphasis on objects with social connotations such as cream-puffs, lilies and thirteen kinds of sandwiches. The Sheridans also have piano, chesterfield furniture, the house includes a smoking room, a dining room, they have their own private tennis-court and they depend on hired help around the house. The careful planning and execution of the party show that it is particularly the women in the Sheridan family who struggle to obtain the highest degree of similarity to the English culture as possible. The household is run by the female members of the family, while Laura’s father and brother keep their distance from domestic issues. They are not involved in the party arrangements, and return from the office after the guests have left. Markers of social class are exaggerated almost to the point of comedy by the female part of the family, which reflects the widely held sentiment that New Zealand was imitative of England and functioned as a cultural transplant from the metropolis. Critics support the image of a socially divided New Zealand described by Mansfield.

The garden is also seen as a microcosm. The details in the garden space display a mixture of English and New Zealand flora[23]. Indeed, the only truly New Zealand element in the garden is hidden away and covered by the exhibition area which is an apparent subversion and devaluation of the original New Zealand elements.

The intense and detailed descriptions of the elements in the garden partly creates this effect, but more importantly through the division that is carefully maintained between the inside and the outside. The workmen, who come from the outside to put up the marquee, are unfamiliar in Laura’s eyes. She objectifies and observes them with keen amazement: “Oh, how extraordinarily nice workmen were”, she thought. Laura finds their behaviour interesting, but is unable to identify the reason of her finding the behaviour of the workmen so attractive, which emphasises their difference. The value system of the Sheridans, then, depends on the colonial centre to be maintained. . However, the contrast between the inside and outside seems more marked to the female members of the family. The male members of the family move in a larger area outside the garden while the domestic sphere is the centre for the women. The female members of the Sheridan family are unaware of the structures which maintain their social status at the expense of others and appear perfectly happy to focus on the pleasant aspects of their existence, ignoring whatever exists outside the garden gates. And this attitude is what Laura wishes to challenge. The narrative described the mix between English and New Zealand elements and the result is a hybrid blend of traditional English customs with a hint of exoticism. Godber’s men deliver cream puffs, a traditional English dessert, and the Sheridans serve fifteen types of sandwiches including cream-cheese and lemon-curd and passion-fruit ices. The manners and customs associated with the English upper middle class social life scene are also kept intact. Certain phrases from the party serve as examples: “Never a more delightful garden party…. The greatest success… Quite the most…” Laura helped her mother with the good-byes. They stood side by side by the porch till it was all over”. Throughout the party, Laura has played the role of the perfect hostess taking care of the guests: “Have you had tea? Won’t you have an ice? The passion-fruit ices are really rather special”. The following quote illustrates the kind of social events girls of the upper middle class were expected to partake in: Oh, how extraordinarily nice workmen were, she thought. Why couldn’t she have workmen for friends rather than the silly boys she danced with and who came to Sunday night supper? She would get on much better with men like these”. The English sensibility which marks the behaviour in the Sheridan household stands for a simulacrum of England.

In tune with the social constructionist approach, place can be seen as an expression of the wider social process under the condition of post-colonialism. The elements in the landscape described in the story, Mansfield’s “The Garden Party”, as well as the way in which the characters relate to it, express processes of colonialism. As already mentioned in the introduction, the environment Mansfield portrayed in her later stories is that of her New Zealand childhood. New Zealand in the late nineteenth century had not yet developed a sense of national consciousness, and was prone to be imitative of England. The community Mansfield remembered from her childhood resembled suburban England, but placed in an overseas location, the divide between social classes was reinforced. Furthermore, because the pursuit of material comfort was the main motivation for most settlers emigrating to New Zealand, the settler community was bound to be more concerned with material rather than intellectual matters[24]. Class divisions and the occupation with material comfort are indeed reflected in the story at hand. The emphasis on material comfort and luxury shows a preoccupation with the surface level and markers of social status. The topographical details of the garden are subtly rendered and reflect the upper middle class environment the Sheridans belong to.

In terms of liminality, Laura’s journey to the cottages can also be read as a journey of initiation or a “rite of passage”. Returning to Turner’s treatment of van Gennep’s definition of the three phases (separation, margin and reaggragation), it is evident that the phases are reflected in Laura’s development as a character. The first phase, separation, involves detachment from a set of cultural conditions. These conditions apply both to social class and Laura’s role within the family. Laura’s development in “The Garden Party” links to “a crossing-place from one state of being to another”[25]. Laura undergoes a transition from mimicking her mother’s behaviour and copying her view of the world to questioning her mother’s basic assumptions. Throughout the day of the party, Laura is testing her attitudes and behaviour and her place within the family as well as the social class she is affiliated with. This is particularly evident during the preparations of the party, as well as the discussion following the information about the dead neighbour. As the story opens, Laura copies her mother’s voice when she greets the workmen, but thinks she sounds, fearfully affected‟ (246). The telephone conversation, where Laura talks to a friend who has been invited to the party, also reveals the act of mimicking her mother’s voice: “Mrs. Sheridan’s voice floated down the stairs. “Tell her to wear that sweet hat she had on last Sunday … Mother says you’re to wear that sweet hat you had on last Sunday. Good. One o’clock. Bye-bye”. However, as the day progresses, Laura feels increasingly different from the rest of her family, and attempts to express resistance against the family consensus. When Laura hears the news about the diseased neighbour, she expresses her difference of opinion. She instinctively wants to call off the party, but needs to consult her mother first: “Laura turned furiously on Jose. She said as they had used to say on those occasions, I’m going straight up to tell mother”. The fact that she questions the act of covering the tree suggests a growing unease with, and critique of, the colonial system she is part of, which values English roses and lilies above the natural New Zealand plants. In the case of the karaka trees, Laura fails in stating her difference of opinion, and the marquee is put up in front of the karakas. After the guests have left, Laura reflects more explicitly on her sense of being different: “Again, how curious, she seemed to be different from them all; to take scraps from the party. Would the poor woman really like that?”

This development shows that the stage of separation is a gradual process, which goes very well with the rite of passage.

The garden space is liminal because it is an in-between place which serves as an extension to the house. The garden is in-between nature and civilisation; it is natural but at the same cultivated. It is in-between the private and public sphere. Laura’s change and increased maturity seem to depend on an unsure liminal space in order to make the transition easier. The basis of the narrative is the period of transition between childhood and adult age. Mansfield herself played the role of intermediate between two worlds, that of the “New world” of New Zealand and the “Old world” of the metropolitan centre in London. Laura’s role as outsider might reflect the exile experience in more ways than one. She is also an outsider in terms of experience when banished from the Garden of Eden. The way Laura moves from inclusion to exile reflects her exile experience showing that the insider position can be fragile. In this story, the garden gate marks the boundary between inside and outside, linking Laura’s journey to colonialism: “The garden gate becomes the boundary between two seemingly irreconcilable worlds, a boundary whose crossing becomes a highly significant and often transgressive event[26].

 

The purpose and success of writing of race relations such as those texts discussed above depend on a particularly narrow gap between fiction and reality, and an equally uncontested faith on the part of the reader in the author’s authenticity and authority. Although claiming to be fictional, the author’s authority to speak for a minority viewpoint makes the components of the purposive text also take on an aura of dependable realism. In accordance with bicultural and postcolonial sensitivity to minority expression, the Maori writer’s cultural authority is paramount and unchallenged. This in turn establishes a particular link between writer narrative, and subject-reader in that the reader is actively encouraged to identify the writer with the narrative subject and the subject with reality. In “This life is weary”, as in a significant amount of Maori writing, historical figures and real settings cohabit with the fictional. This creates a blurring of fact and fiction intensified by a direct link between the author and the site, in Ihimaera’s ongoing fictionalization of the village he grew up in, Waituhi, and its local history. Certainly, postcolonial writing must negotiate its own relationship between fictiveness and reality, and between writer and reader, rather than accept the model of Western literature. Indeed, postcolonial literature came about quite differently from other genres associated with either style or period: minority writers emerged, as did their cultural independences, by asserting their right to be recognized on the grounds that they had always been present, albeit suppressed or ignored by the dominating mainstream. In other words, they emerged within the framework of nation building, and thus share a desire for recognition and autonomy, which can only be gained through struggle.

There is a potential tension in the term and label “indigenous” that may help explain the constant wavering between voices and positions that implies an element of confusion about the role and significance of identifying as a Maori writer, and the appropriate relationship with the non-Maori reader. The ongoing predominance of nationalistic writing bespeaks a measure of protectionism, which includes reluctance to engage cross-culturally with other postcolonial and indigenous cultures. Indeed, many features are shared by the terminology of indigeneity and of nationalism. The etymology of the term “indigenous” situates the native as naturally coming from and belonging to the land. The meaning and value of that original belonging in relation to the land and to other occupants in contemporary nation-states is contested while the claim to first occupancy is apparently clear. In New Zealand, the Pakeha claim to indigeneity as a way to separate their identity from that of their British colonial ancestors is contested by Maori who consider their earlier belonging to the land an exclusive precondition to the indigenous title.

As representative and as inherently political Ihimaera’s writing of race relations agrees on both counts. He admits representational responsibility in order to balance the national historical archives. In this, he conceives of fiction as a useful vehicle for communicating Maori claims to a broader public. He believes that writing of race relations has possible real redemptive social implications: in short, that art matters. Nevertheless, argument has met with criticism from postcolonial critics because their conception of minor literature does not allow the writer any other modality. The private side of Ihimaera’s fiction illustrates that categorical schema is too restrictive. The Maori writer’s literature of purposive race relations sits alongside his “selfish” writing which neither aims to represent nor to separate, but to describe ways in which Pakeha and Maori cultures are “crossing over”, for the biculturalism.

Ihimaera’s rewriting and updating his 1970s fiction to the 2000s keeps on continuing to activate confrontational Maori-Pakeha race relations. Furthermore, recent Maori and Pakeha anthologies, such as Huia’s biennial collection and Pirie’s and Kidman’s anthologies, record Maori fiction of the 2000s that, in some cases, is not easy to distinguish from Maori writing. The constant return to the early colonial period is one key theme in Maori writing which might be considered within the terms of transgression. While Ihimaera might experiment with different genres, such as science fiction or opera, or with reality, as when he blurs fantasy, dream and myth, he does not experiment with narrative perspective or mimeticism in the apparently sacred issue of Maori impoverishment and victimization at the hands of rapacious British colonials and Pakeha. Rather than international postcolonial trends, the emergence of Maori writers and fiction is primarily linked to the Maori sovereignty and cultural Renaissance movements, and its ongoing promulgation is a response to national biculturalism. New Zealand’s institutionalized biculturalism is not intended to restrict cultural sharing between indigenous and non-indigenous, although it might appear protectionist and exclusivist, but it is meant to ensure that Maori profit from their intellectual and cultural property.

 

3. Human relations

 

Maori customs, practices before the Maoris came into contact with other cultures, were taken less seriously by the 1990s and Maoris today, like other New Zealanders, typically address each other informally and emphasize friendliness in relationships.

Hakari (feasting) is among such Maori custom and was an important aspect of Maori culture. The Maori feasts brought together a number of different families and other social groups. Food and gifts are provided for those who attended by a man of status. His status would have been increased enormously, although, in the end, he and his family would be left with very little regarding material possessions or reserves of food.

Premarital sexual relationships were considered normal for Maori adolescents. Both males and females were expected to have a series of private relationships before they married. When Maori females became sexually active, they were to publicly acknowledge this so that they could become tattooed. Tattooing marked their ritual and public passage into adulthood. It was also considered extremely attractive and erotic.

The Maoris have a traditional greeting, called hongi, in which they touch faces so that their noses are pressed together. It is believed that their spirits mingle through this gesture.

 

3.1. Man-woman relation: betrayal and loss of happiness in “Bliss/Summons to Alexandra”

 

The jobs of women in Maori tribes are very important. Although they could not fight in war or have full facial tattoos, they were considered very sacred because they would provide the tribe with generations to come.  Without the women they could not have meetings because it was the women who did the opening calls, something that a man could not do.  Women also were in charge of the songs and dances; they were responsible for the stories to tell. They also took care of the family and the cooking though the men helped as well. Women were not allowed to stay near the carvers or carve at all because of their menstrual cycle.  In a whole, women played a key role in the Maori culture.

The women wear mainly the mokus (facial tattoos) on the chin.  If a woman had them on her nostrils or in between her eyebrows that means that she was very important, probably the chief’s wife.  The more tattoos you had the higher your rank in the tribe was. The tattoos told your story. It told where you were born, who you were born to, what tribe you belonged to, and what you did. Sometimes, it also told who you were to marry.  In the old days of the Maoris, the mokus were chiseled into the skin. It was scarred into the skin. It was a very painful process and tattooists were held in the highest respect.

Without women in the Maori culture it would be impossible to have meetings, greet other tribes, and have families. Maori women are often over-looked but they play a key point in the culture with dance and song.  The art of poi, which was first a strengthening tool for the men, the women turned it into a very beautiful dance.  Women brought new ideas to the culture.

 

“Bliss’’[27], of Mansfield, opens with the description of Bertha Young’s wonderful life. As she walks home, she is overwhelmed by a feeling of bliss; she feels tremendously content with her home, her husband, her baby, and her friends. At home, she begins to prepare for a dinner party she is having that evening. She reflects on the guests, Mr. and Mrs. Knight, an artistic couple, Eddie Warren, a playwright, and Pearl Fulton, Bertha’s newest friend that will be arriving soon. Bertha wishes Pearl to be appreciated by her husband, Harry who has expressed some misgivings over the women’s burgeoning friendship and she hopes they will end up becoming friends too. Bertha looks out on her garden while waiting for her guests. Her enjoyment of a pear tree with wide open blossoms that she sees as her self-representation is ruined by two cats creeping across the lawn. She meditates on her happy and perfect life. She goes upstairs to dress, and soon thereafter her guests and husband arrive for dinner. The group moves into the dining room, where they eat with relish and discuss the contemporary theater and literary scene. Bertha cannot help thinking of the pear tree again. She also senses that Pearl shares her feelings of bliss, and she is simply waiting for a sign from the other woman to show her recognition of the empathy between them. After dinner, as Bertha is about to make the coffee, Pearl gives her the sign by asking if Bertha has a garden. Bertha pulls apart the curtains to display the garden and the pear tree. Bertha imagines that Pearl responds positively to the tree, but she is not sure if it really happened. Over coffee, the group talks about a variety of topics. Bertha perceives Harry’s dislike for Pearl and wants to tell him how much she has shared with her friend. She is suddenly overcome by a feeling of sexual desire for her husband. This is the first time she has felt this way, and she is eager for the guests to leave so she can be alone with Harry. After the Knights leave, Pearl and Eddie are set to share a taxi. As Pearl goes to the hall to get her coat, Harry accompanies her. Eddie asks Bertha if she has a certain book of poems. Bertha goes to retrieve the book from a nearby table. As she looks out into the hallway, she sees her husband and Pearl embrace and makes arrangements to meet the next day. Pearl reenters the room to thank Bertha for the party. The two guests leave and Harry, still cool and collected, says he will shut up the house. Bertha runs to the window to look at the pear tree. She cries “Oh, what is going to happen now?” but outside the pear tree stays in its same state.

‘‘Bliss’’ relates a fateful day in the life of Bertha Young. Bertha, a thirty-year-old housewife, tenaciously clings to the belief that she has everything, a fine, dependable husband; ‘‘an adorable baby’’; ‘‘modern, thrilling friends’’; and the material comforts that money can buy. Yet as day merges into evening, it becomes clear that Bertha’s declarations of happiness serve as a mere cover-up for what she lacks in her life. This feeling reaches its culmination when she finds out that her husband Harry is having an affair with her friend, Pearl Fulton, the very friend she had believed was the only person to share her overflowing emotions. The richness of ‘‘Bliss’’ allows for much discussion; critics have focused on different aspects of the story, those they deem most essential to its understanding, such as character analysis, sexual desire, and Mansfield’s use of symbolism, imagery, and satire. Just as critics do not always agree on what is the most important facet of ‘‘Bliss’’, what makes the story ‘‘work’’ and indeed survive the decades, neither do they always agree in their analysis of what remains at the core of the story: Bertha’s feelings of bliss.

Marriage and adultery are the central themes of “Bliss”. Bertha believes (or convinces herself) her marriage is fulfilled and complete. Although she characterizes her husband as a good pal, she still contends they are as much in love as they ever were. For instance, in “Bliss”, when Bertha is preparing for the dinner-party to which she has invited several members of the gay and fashionable world, she decides that she must have some purple fruit to “bring the carpet up to the table”. She arranges these with the tangerines, apples, pears, and white grapes in a glass dish and the blue bowl with the strange sheen on it.

These two exaggerated arrangements appeals to the reader as a sense of Bertha’s almost hysterical bliss. Her tendency in excessively magnify her happiness is also seen in her inclination to exaggeration in all her descriptions. She finds Eddie Warren’s white socks charming; once she has seen Mrs. Norman Knight’s monkey-patterned coat, she imagines her amber ear-rings as dangling nuts, and her yellow silk dress as made out of scraped banana skins. There is over-emphasis also in her need to convince herself that she is happy, “Really – really – she had everything. She was young. Harry and she were as much in love as ever”[28].

This is how Bertha exposes her bliss. But it is an imagined bliss imparted to her readers through Bertha’s fancifulness and fantastic metaphor. However, it is precisely her imaginativeness which tells us that Bertha is deceiving herself. She is aware that she is thirty years old, yet she is acting like an adolescent. She is now happy because she feels finally ready to be a wife, but persists in her effort to dupe herself. Self-betrayal is thus the harm done here.

When Bertha realizes that Harry has an affair with Pearl, that is the proof that her husband does not share her contentment and this is the climactic event of the story. Harry’s affair demonstrates his unhappiness with the lack of passion in their marriage. Harry’s actions reveal his duplicitous nature: not only has Harry been hiding the affair from his wife, he also pretends to dislike Pearl in order to cover it up. The risk that Harry takes in kissing Pearl in his own home, as well as his method of hiding his true feelings, indicate the likelihood that there is a very strong connection between him and Pearl. The subtle themes in the story are change and transformation. Bertha’s extreme sense of bliss as well as her new feelings of sexual desire for her husband shows that she is in under a process of change. That makes her wonder whether the feeling of bliss that she had all day was actually leading up to her increased attraction for her husband. At the end of the story, she wants nothing more than for the guests to leave so she can be alone with Harry. Bertha’s transformation into a sexual being is abruptly halted when she sees her husband kissing Pearl Fulton. She realizes that from then on will have a different view of her world as perfect, nor can she move forward to a new relationship with Harry. Throughout ‘‘Bliss’’ Mansfield ironically plays off a conventional love triangle against an unconventional one, forcing the reader to make the necessary adjustment. She subtly controls her symbolism and other modes of suggestion and indirection to convey the tendency of Bertha’s peculiar feelings and her lack of self-knowledge, the degree of ignorance in her bliss. ‘‘Bliss’’ adequately illustrates both the care and the craft. But even more perfectly, it exemplifies, perhaps, the kind of joy which every practitioner of the art of fiction must feel when he successfully detaches the object from himself[29].

The pear tree is the most significant expression of Bertha’s bliss as she herself describes it, “Bertha couldn’t help feeling, even from this distance, that it had not a single bud or a faded petal”. This tree in its perfection is symbolic of Bertha’s life seemingly contented, a thing of beauty and excellence. When Miss Fulton says before leaving, “Your lovely pear tree!”, and Bertha answers, “Oh, what is going to happen now?” leads the reader to anticipate that betrayal will spell suffering for all concerned.

In ‘‘Bliss’’, this technique is most apparent, perhaps, in a significant passage occurring just after Bertha Young has her first experience of sexual desire for her husband: ‘‘But now, ardently! ardently! The word ached in her ardent body! Was this what that feeling of bliss had been leading up to? But then.’’ Only a proper understanding of the psychological meaning of the story’s action enables us to complete correctly that final sentence.

A provocative study in mood and feeling within a conventional love-triangle plot is embodied in “Bliss’’. The climax has been seen when Bertha’s discovered her husband Harry and her friend Pearl Fulton have a love affair, a revelation which destroys her growing sense of marital bliss. In accordance with this interpretation, two main ironies exist: ‘‘Bertha’s realization that her admired friend Miss Fulton shares her own unique bliss, and then her discovery that the shared mood has the same origin for each love for Harry.’’ All the art goes into establishing the precarious external dependency of Bertha’s bliss, ‘‘and it is a disastrous descent to a lower plane when, at the end, she appears to say, ‘Disillusionment, you see, might have come in some such way as this . . . .’’’ Actually the story is more subtle than Shanks imagines and more complexly ironic, because the point of Bertha’s disillusionment is not that both she and her friend love Harry and Harry loves Pearl instead of his wife, but that Bertha also loves Miss Fulton. The thoughts and feelings here belong to Bertha’s dream, so different from what Pearl, the silver moon, the silver flower to Bertha’s yearning desire must be thinking as she stands next to her lover’s wife. Both the “as it were” and the final question undercut Bertha’s hopes for a silent communion with her “new find”. One must consider those earlier passages of thought and feeling which resonate both with it and with the startling scene of disillusionment immediately following before understanding the significance of this moment for Bertha.

Early in the story we have an insight into Bertha’s muted sexual feelings. “How idiotic civilization is”, she thinks: “Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?” The thought of her body’s not being used bears implications causing her to resist her analogy: “No, that about the fiddle is not quite what I mean,’ she thought, running up the steps and feeling in her bag for the key…. Beyond a certain point, Bertha would not go, and she nervously allows herself to be distracted from pursuing her thoughts. The idea would bring Harry to mind, simultaneously forcing her to acknowledge that Harry cannot be blamed for her sexual indifference. The real issue that Bertha will not pursue is the origin of this indifference. Just before the close of the story, Mansfield reveals the crucial fact that Bertha and her husband are simply good pals Mansfield initially presents Bertha in a state of unfocused, semi-hysterical bliss heightened by thoughts of Miss Fulton, her most recent “find”, whom she had met at the club: “And Bertha had fallen in love with her, as she always did fall in love with beautiful women who had something strange about them”. The mentioning of her falling in love elicits at first only casual attention, since the phrase characterizes Bertha’s hyper-sensibility and exaggerated manner of expression. We note, however, that Bertha habitually finds and picks up beautiful women, afterward trying to draw them out. Toward what end, she does not specify: “Up to a certain point Miss Fulton was rarely, wonderfully frank, but the certain point was there, and beyond that she would not go”. Bertha does not consciously know the tendency of her own solicitations. Throughout “Bliss”, there is an ironical play off of a conventional love triangle against an unconventional one by Mansfield that forces the reader to make the necessary adjustment. She subtly controls her symbolism and other modes of suggestion and indirection to convey the tendency of Bertha’s peculiar feelings and her lack of self-knowledge, the degree of ignorance in her bliss[30].

 

Still in this note of betrayal, “Summons to Alexandra” reveals the hatred those who feel they have been left to second choice have toward those who have been perceived as superior and successful. Barbara has come to central Otago to visit her sister Anna and see her new baby, before going back overseas. Barbara has a disturbing feeling as she meets Anna’s husband, James, and sees some of their ten children eating honey. …they made a soft murmur like the blurred sound of whirring wings. Anna is upstairs, lying on her yellow bed like a glorious queen bee. Anna is anxious as she is aware that she is too old even to adopt children. As she leaves the property she sees two ‘golden insects’ fighting. Barbara watches the winner flowing in the direction of the hive that she knew lay not very far away.

In this history, only at adolescence, Anna had feared her transition from girl into woman and Barbara reveled in it, they begun to break apart. Indeed, in those days, Barbara’s awareness of her sexuality had made her into a being of brilliance, completely overshadowing her younger sister. Barbara had led ail her men on a merry dance and spread her glory wide through the summer sky. James himself had been one of Barbara’s conquests, and when he fell from grace he had turned to the woman who reminded him of her — Anna. As for Barbara, she had flown higher and higher, and an investment banker by the name of Harry had caught her. Barbara and Harry had married in one of the society weddings of the year. Barbara had been pleased when her little sister and James had married early in the following year. For fifteen years after their marriages the balance had changed between Barbara and Anna, not only because of James, who had a history with her, and had told Anna, in a peak of anger, that he still loved Barbara; but also because of Anna’s obscene capacity to produce children in Barbara’s eyes. Anna, who is the one who had denied her sexuality, had become the one who produced the children, ten in ail, growing more and more beautiful with each child. And the one who had once been in the ascendant, Barbara, had had one child, a daughter, who had died in infancy and then, no matter how hard she had tried, no further children. The priority in womanhood was on homebuilding and motherhood while that of in girlhood was on beauty and sexuality. There was no way out. And who could blame Harry, who wanted children desperately, for his little infidelities? Certainly not Barbara who took the blame entirely on herself.

Barbara is an interesting character in Witi Ihimaera’s “Summons to Alexandra”, a young woman who cares for her family, and put her feelings into silence. Barbara helps to deliver the idea of feeling something else with great enthusiasm in this story, unlike the character of Anna which is also an interesting character as she protects and cares for the people in her family, including her sister, when she was betrayed by James with marrying a man that loved Barbara, became the husband of his sister. Barbara and Anna are similar in some ways, namely their bravery and the way they relate to the present through flashbacks from the past. However, their difference stands in their perspective of thinking, considering that Barbara is less aware and less focused on her situation that Anna is about her own. Barbara, with her enthusiasm and lovingness, is an interesting character by addressing the concept of mourning in the sense of betrayal, in this woman who must both give up on her husband, whom she loves, her child who died in infancy, and the idea of ​​reconciling with her sister, when the latter had 10 children whereas she has none.

Ihimaera opens to the readers a different situation besides exposing them to many experiences of shattering betrayals. In this story, he manifests the perception of falseness, sterility, and ostentation in the social life of his times. He himself had had sufficient contact with this society to develop an attitude partly of acceptance and partly of hostility to its brittle sophistication. Thus, he deplores the suffering such insincere living causes, and defines this refined society as cruel.

This is how Ihimaera discusses the concept of betrayal and loss of happiness, but there are also other concepts that the author has already discussed earlier, namely identity, sadness, role of women, etc. a first time deep and tender in comparison with that of Mansfield, hardened feminist.

 

3.2. Social conditions: differences in social class in “The Garden Party/This Life is Weary”

 

Witi Ihimaera, considered a pioneer in Maori literature, and “the leading male Maori novelist” of the day, rewrites some of Katherine Mansfield’s well-known New Zealand stories, including “The Garden Party”, in his response collection of short stories on the occasion of the birth centenary of Mansfield, the canonized mother of New Zealand literature.

Mansfield, with an open challenge from the post-colonial, gained beneath [his] feet. “This life is weary” is a case in point; it is one of those stories in this collection in which the challenge and re-inscription is at its most explicit; here Ihimaera writes back to “The Garden party”[31].

 

The process of constructing place by re-shaping, re-modeling and manipulating the natural elements in the landscape is the female members of the family’s continual aspiration[32].

Matters of social class are central to the story. The contrast between the bright garden on the top of the hill and the dark cottages “at the very bottom of a steep rise” is highlighted, and the characters and their class affiliation are also reflected in the spatial opposition between above and below. The notion that no alternative reality exists outside the garden gates, the shallowness of the Sheridan household, as well as the light atmosphere in the garden, suggest suppression. Laura is the only exception while the characters in the later New Zealand stories refuse to deal directly with the effects of colonialism.

Laura Sheridan has the central mental landscape of “The Garden Party”. She is one out of many of Mansfield’s young girl protagonists who are on the brink of adulthood. As the story begins, Mrs. Sheridan tells her daughter that she wants to leave the preparations “to you children this year”. In her mother’s words “the artistic one”, Laura is in charge of the party arrangements, and as she welcomes the workmen who have come to put up the marquee, she mimics her mother’s voice: “Good morning”, she said, copying her mother’s voice. The various discoveries Laura makes in the course of the day, and her growing sense of independence and difference, make her assert her independence more or less successfully. She is also increasingly aware of her individual identity as different from the identity of the Sheridan family as a whole. The hat is inextricably linked to Laura’s identity and personal development. Black, it becomes a symbol of death as it foreshadows her visit to the cottages, but more importantly, it becomes a symbol of social class, which is inextricably linked to identity. The hat, then, becomes the object used by Laura to test her own identity as belonging to, yet separate from, the rest of her family.

We will deal with the archetypal image of the garden in due course, but let us first establish its symbolism that differs from its archetype character. The garden is a symbol of life, development and natural growth. It means a growing into maturity, “but also the inevitable withering of flowers and plants. As a parallel to life itself, the garden party set during one single day is, the brief moment men enjoy between cradle and grave”.

 

Ihimaera deals with social class in “This life is weary” and the difference between two families is the center of the interest, including toward “The big house”.

The little cottages were in a lane to themselves at the very bottom of a steep rise while the house that the children called The Big House was at the top; its lovely appearance with the gardens and the lovely people living it makes everybody call it so, a different, much nicer world unlike the one where they live down below with the broad road which ran between. The children go up to The Big House on Saturday afternoons, they cross quickly over the broad road in order to watch the house and the movements there, with its lovely people coming and going.  Mr Sheridan was the head of the Household. He worked in the city must of the time absent from the house. Mrs Sheridan was the Mistress of the House, like a lady in a magazine, prones to sitting on a chair of the main bedroom and fanning herself. Children focused all their attention on the three daughters and the son of Mr and Mrs Sheridan; they are fascinated by these four fascinating golden creatures. Margaret and Thomas described every appearance while Celia would scribble like mad in her notebook. Laura is the main interest of the children among the Sheridan family members; the one whom they thought was most like themselves. Each time she enters, she was greeted by a star-struck audience in the same way as a diva, with a hushed indrawn breath, moment of recogni­tion, long sigh of release and joyous acclamation. Celia insisted that Laura had the same age as here, and could do no wrong. The children wanted her mostly to be their friend. The appearances by the Sheridans were seen from afar on most occasions. Laura appeared with three of her dolls, placed them on chairs and proceeded to have afternoon tea with cakes and biscuits. “Lady Elizabeth, would you care for some milk? Sugar? One lump or two?”

Several obvious truths exist in this sociolect or language peculiar to Sheridan’s own social class and telling of its values. Their own social circle is what the Sheridan are exclusively focused on, their first and only priority which leads them to expect Celia act the same way. They seek intense relationships in order to belong to a social group which is really important to them. While giving the impression that their emotional life is rich, showing love and understanding to those around, these people are in essence devoid of “true warmth or inner feeling,” that is the most outstanding symptom by which this disease hard to diagnose is identified[33]. Sheridan’s family are not interested in sharing other’s miseries, typical of Mansfield’s characters that “launch themselves into the highest enthusiasms, with wild superlatives, enthusiastically enjoying life [. . .]”[34] with their peers. Celia is different from them and shows an absence of a sense of self beneath the socio-moral structure where she belongs, yet the sense seems to be there but she is  unaware of it until it is awakened by the significant local event.

No clear-cut resolution was reached at the conclusion of the story. The reader hopes for a definite sense of an ending after witnessing Celia’s transitions whereas Celia is in a more insecure situation than before in the end the story, that can be, with good reason, attributed to the conventional Victorian education limiting her vision making her keeping on leading her existence happily without caring about truths of life. Only in the world outside, but within her line of sight, would she be able to understand that there is no consistency in artificial happiness, implying that there is a coexistence of sadness and happiness, ugliness and beauty in life as inseparable halves of a whole; that nothing can escape death even their extravagant house surrounded by appealing grounds. Only in the dark world outside, when not under the “tutelage” of her family, would she be able to experience genuine enlightenment regarding the other general human condition and the reality of social circles than her own. However, it is still somewhat impossible for the reader to predict optimistically Celia’s future since once back home, opulence and the teachings long engraved upon her mind, never to be forgotten, begin to outweigh the effect of the discoveries she has just made, and her interest in others with low social status soon trails off, though seeming to have thrived on the brief experience she had that day and, in a sense, gained a toehold in both settings. To make matters far worse, to alternate between the two different settings when unready, as well as between moments of joy and contact with poverty, ugliness, and death, afflict Celia’s soul, causing her to change into an uncertain, inconsistent, and vulnerable adult who does not know what to think, how to feel, or where to belong.

“This Life is Weary” then tells about domestic tales in which Maori and European alike observe the rest of the world from the outside, and this is featured by the children in the affecting  who spend their Saturdays, hidden in the shrubs, watching the activities of the fortunate family that lives in “The Big House”.

 

English customs tended to be transplanted by settlers in British colonies to a foreign location. There is a hegemonic cultural discourse of the English upper middle class that is openly expressed in “The Garden Party”, it is shown through mannerisms, language, social decorum and the emphasis on objects with social connotations such as cream-puffs, lilies and thirteen kinds of sandwiches. The Sheridans also have piano, chesterfield furniture, the house includes a smoking room, a dining room, they have their own private tennis-court and they depend on hired help around the house. The careful planning and execution of the party show that the women in the Sheridan family are the ones who are particularly struggling to obtain the highest degree of similarity to the English culture as possible. The household is run by the female members of the family, while Laura’s father and brother keep their distance from domestic issues. They are not involved in the party arrangements, and return from the office after the guests have left. Markers of social class are exaggerated almost to the point of comedy by the female part of the family, which reflects the widely held sentiment that New Zealand was imitative of England and functioned as a cultural transplant from the metropolis.

 

3.3. Pakeha versus Maori way of life

 

The reification of Maori culture leads to the growing of Pakeha-style biculturalism following the land wars from about 1872. With its graphic flattening-out and ‘freezing’ of history: in the half-century through to the 1920s which James Belich has identified, invaluably, as “re-colonial”[35], that bas-relief on the Jubilee statue in Wellington can help us understand what this means. Maori culture was historicised, neutralised, bleached out and drawn into that first false dawn of colonial nationalism we have learned to see in the phenomenon of “Maoriland”. The Treaty comes back in another form somewhere in here after a first fifty years in which it was progressively destroyed as a living legal document. Ritually, in a one-off re-enactment of the signing at Waitangi that was part of the country’s Jubilee in 1890, and in a growing white settler mythology most easily glimpsed in the textbooks it gave its children to read in the following decades, which set out a history in which Maori were presented as just the latest indigenous people to be brought up to speed by the arrival of British imperialism[36]. It has, in response, been argued and from about the 1920s, the collection of crafts and performances were created out of the wreckage of their own cultures by Maori themselves, known as Maoritanga[37]. These two reified elements of the “re-colonial”, that are Pakeha and Maori, reach their climax, in the governor-general Lord Bledisloe’s gifting of the Treaty site at Russell to the nation in 1932 and, at the site couple of years later, the first of our modern Waitangi Day celebrations. A hundred Nga Puhi women performing a traditional dance figure on a surviving photo of that inaugural ceremony and in another image of cultural pairing, the official party gazes stolidly back. The Treaty had become some kind of Universal Solvent to the dominant culture by this time, to judge from the governor-general’s speech on the day, part of its authoritative discourse, part of an unquestionable ‘truth’ in which it was seen as having brought undying peace and amity to the colony[38].

The careers of other Maori writers of the last thirty years put the stresses of this bicultural seduction as evidence. Issues are almost certainly irrelevant to Maori as Ihimaera’s public change of heart which suggests that the issues crucial to the Maori artist in the early twenty-first century have nothing much to do with exactly how indigenous Pakeha would like to feel. He has once more reminded us of where the trade winds are blowing at the moment and, with the help of Grace and Hulme, has indicated routes that might and might not be taken with his extraordinary ability to live the public narrative of Maori culture. Of course, we would all like to know where Maori art will go with these winds, but if he has picked the fight breeze, it might well be to a place where Pakeha will have difficulty finding, even if the directions are written in the language that they speak.

 

3.3.1. “Her First Ball/His First Ball”: Maori and the self-discovery

 

Ihimaera’s wrote a narrative response to the original Her First Ball, by Katherine Mansfield, from Dear Miss Mansfield’s thirteen stories, in his His First Ball, which completely different from Maori people’s culture, but possibly, unknowingly, related to a modern Maori society. The language in Her First Ball is that of aristocratic British while His First Ball uses seemingly perfect colloquial language. Coral, Tuta Wharepapa’s mother, teases a great deal in his son having received this mystery letter in an envelope bearing a very imposing insignia of the government house.

 

In “Her First Ball”, Katherine Mansfield testifies to the survival of the fashionable dance teacher well into the 20th century. Had she been in Christchurch her Miss Eccles might have been modeled on Miss Charlotte Lowe, grand-daughter of the dancing teacher of Queen Victoria’s family: “Leila had learned to dance at boarding school. Every Saturday afternoon the boarders were hurried off to a little corrugated iron mission hall where Miss Eccles (of London) held her select classes. But the difference between that dusty-smelling hall with calico texts on the walls, the poor terrified little woman in a brown velvet toque with rabbit’s ears thumping the cold piano, Miss Eccles poking the girls’ feet with her long white wand- and this, was so tremendous that Leila was sure if her partner didn’t come and she had to listen to that marvelous music and to watch the others sliding, gliding over the golden floor, she would die at least, or faint, or lift her arms and fly out of one of those dark windows that showed the stars[39]. In fact, the ball, being an invigorating phenomenon of the colonial life in the 19th-century in New Zealand, made and unmade matches, mixed society together in some kaleidoscopic spin, gave a sense of cohesion and purpose to isolated communities and kept the musical bonds with Britain and Europe in its whole shape. Its elements go beyond rational analysis with the clothes, the perfumes, the hairstyles, the lace, the flounces; the visits to the milliners and the perusal of the latest fashions from overseas; the program card (the “carnet du bal”) originally silver or tortoiseshell, velvet or satin, and finally, paper, the gold pencil which became reduced to a mere wooden artifact with a tassel finish; the preparation of the supper, the ordering of wine, port, champagne and the bestmadeira, the putting up of the decorations, and above all, whom to invite and whom not.

Katherine Mansfield’s “Her First Ball” is the story of a young Maori girl from the country in New Zealand introduced for the first time to “the beginning of everything”.
she is enchanted with the excitement of the formal dance as any young lady would be, with the handsome young men, the « joyful flutter among the girls, “Leila delights in the music, praying that she will be asked to dance.  When a young man does request a dance, “she floated away like a flower that is tossed into a pool”.  However, Leila notes that her partners do not seem very interested in the conversation and the dancing whereas she is so thrilled while dancing with other young men. She then notices the old fat man, and in her mind, he should have been sitting on the stage with the mothers and fathers instead of being on the dance floor.  This man leads Leila onto the dance floor, and he asks her if she is at her first ball: “Of course…you can’t hope to last anything like as long as that….long before that you’ll e sitting up there on the stage, looking on, in your nice black velvet.  And these pretty arms will have turned into little short fate ones, and you’ll beat time with such a different kind of fan–a black bony one….And your heart will ache, ache…because no one wants to kiss you now. »
After the old man says these words to Leila, the old man who, by the way symbolizes time, the music seems to change to a more melancholic one:  “Why didn’t happiness last forever?  For ever wasn’t a bit too long?”  It is at this point that Leila has her “moment of truth”:  She realizes that time passes, but she also chooses how to deal with this transitory element of life, the « beginning of everything”.  Instead of caring about the truth of life, Leila chooses to enjoy of the moment:  “And when her next partner bumped her into the fat man and he said, “Pardon”, she smiled at him more radiantly than ever. The opening lines of Mansfield’s “Her First Ball” begin with an allusion to the main character’s feelings:  “Exactly when the ball began Leila would have found it hard to say.  Perhaps her first real partner was the cab”.  She invited the, somewhat hastily, to enjoy Leila’s personal thoughts and to also wonder when exactly the ball began, and to anticipate who her first “real” partner was.  Yet, Mansfield opens the story with a form known as free indirect style while the point of view is still third-person omniscient. “Her First Ball” explicitly contains the theme of change; the entire story turns around Leila’s first encounter with a formal ball, an endeavor attesting to her change towards a bit more maturity and experience.  This theme is confirmed through the first instance of dialogue though it is only alluded to in the opening paragraph through the mention of uncertainty and nervous excitement:  “‘have you really never been to a ball before, Leila?  But, my child, how too weird’ cried the Sheridan girls”.  Mansfield obviously shows early on that one must anticipate the following of the story, a story in which a change, newness yet to be enjoyed and experienced constitute the point of interest in the drama.

Leila dances and holds conversation with a fat gentleman who almost ruins her night of persistent happiness n “Her First Ball”.  The man talks of the sad, decaying nature of those who have danced at many balls saying that Leila, too, will end up unwanted and old.  Leila’s quick responses of uncertainty and confusion reveal how the man has so easily dampened her mood, that he would wield enough power to bring Leila from sheer elation to sad dejection:  “Why had he spoiled it all?” In “Her First Ball”, Leila too rejects man, for at the end of the story, despite the fat man’s depressing intrusions, she immerses herself once again in the lights, music, and dance. Here, she tries to convince herself she has no relation with the fat man. Leila, undertaking the thrilling experience of her first ball, overcomes the invasion of solemn reality channeled through the fat man and continues in youthful resilience.

The idea of a girl’s first experience of a ball is conveyed in the story. There was a novelty to everything surrounding the event in the exposition of Leila. She is the revelation of the excitement of even insignificant things. Her description shows obviously Leila’s longing to attend the ball. She was impressionable and felt that everything around her was magical. The idea of temporary of absolute happiness and the brevity of the youth is also narrated in the story. The old man served reminds that best is ephemeral. Even in Leila’s dreamy environment, reality is striking in the old man’s claiming that Leila would soon grow old too. Leila’s enthusiasm was greatly damped when she realized the pangs of growing up, as mentioned by the old man.

This illustrates Mansfield’s characters do experience the moments of discovery and such moments often mean pain leading them to wonder. The challenge of acceptance comes after the realization of the answer. A further growth in maturity takes place once the challenge is met. But the discovery stops in case it is not.

 

In Witi Ihimaera’s “His First Ball”, Tuta’s realization that he should be himself and not a “carbon copy” is an important event that occurred near the end of the text. First of all, we will describe what happened, where it happened, who was involved, also why and when it happened. Secondly we will explain how this event helped us understand the key idea to be you. Lastly we will conclude our thoughts on the true meaning and our understanding of the event that shows us to be you.

Tuta is the only Maori boy invited to a flash event. This fact is explained by those in charge of running the ball not wanting to look like racists. Tuta was bored at the ball as he had no friends. They constantly mispronounced his name so that he is being called “Mr. Shit”. He is forced to eat disgusting food in his opinion. The point that Tuta is a stranger and does not belong to this social group or class is emphasized here. He eventually finds a friend of his age who is also bored at the ball. The fact that he perseveres and pulls through the really bad situation shows that everyone can pull through a bad situation and find some good out of everything that is, in this case, proved by him finding a friend and enjoying the rest of his night. Tuta shows readers a very good example of staying your-self towards the end of the story. Tuta was sitting down worried about what may happen next, he didn’t handle with the situation well because he ended up trying to fit in and be cool the whole night while everyone was drinking and smoking. The repetition of Tuta referring to the other entire guest as “them” and “they” shows that he does not feel like he belongs or that he is not at all like them. He also says to his mother “it’s hard to be like them”.  In addition, when he is at the ball he says “I went and found myself a corner and wanted the floor to swallow me up, he is referred to as Mr. Tutae which is in Maori literally means Mr. Shit! The following quote shows he is horrified by this saying: “No you got it wrong!, I whispered horrified, not tutae, that’s a rude word! And all that fancy key, it was just chicken, ham, crayfish cakes and seafood”. When he finds the friend they say “they don’t know how to have a good time, them pakehas”, referring again to the other guest as “they would want you at their flash pastry, let’s have a good time’ they say at the end”.

One of Witi Ihimaera’s purposes in writing this story consists in comparing and contrasting the two dominant cultures in New Zealand. The Maori people are the indigenous inhabitants of the island, and the Pakeha are the European immigrants and their descendants. Tuta, a Maori, is offered a chance to see how the other half lives when he receives an invitation from the wife of the Governor-General to attend a state ball as a representative of his coworkers. Tuta himself remains skeptical while his family and friends are curious about his opportunity. The differences between the cultures; dress, table manners, dance, and social graces among the elite white citizens differ sharply with Tuta’s habits are shown in the several preparations he must make to be schooled in Pakeha manners. Some readers will be able to compare the two stories to further understand the differences between the cultures if they are familiar with Pakeha writer Katherine Mansfield’s story about a similar incident.

One of Ihimaera’s life goals resides in documenting Maori culture and making sure that it is recorded in the literature of his native land. His creating of Tuta illustrates the habits and customs of working-class Maori in contemporary New Zealand. What he wants to show is also the independence and pride of his people. Tuta rejects the Pakeha, especially after they demean him with their patronizing attentions at the ball. The Pakeha behave badly in this story, moking Tuta’s name and his ignorance of their expensive hors d’oeuvres although their manners are supposedly superior to those of Tuta and his friends.

The story also, indirectly, defends those cast out as “others” everywhere in the world. The message Ihimaera wanted to convey is that there will always be “others.” That is why Joyce appears at the end of the story and tells Tuta, “Before you. . . it was me.” She has been excluded because she is “six feet six at least.” Tuta’s and Joyce’s ultimate response to the ball show that outsiders who cannot join the elite can nevertheless “beat them if [they] want to” by simply refusing to play the game.

The story alludes to George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (or its musical version, My Fair Lady) when Ihimaera notes that “Mrs. Simmons felt quite sure that Professor Higgins didn’t have it this bad”. This literary convention suggests that the author is not writing for fellow Maoris but rather for whites, particularly people of European descent. Notice, too, that Ihimaera describes the habits Tuta must unlearn, such as preferring to wear purple, keeping his hair long, shuffling his feet, drinking beer, and “hot rock” dancing, but the author assumes that his readers are familiar with the social graces the protagonist must quickly acquire.

Tuta and Joyce are the most likable people at the ball. When they agree to stop mimicking the “beautiful people” at the party, they also have the most fun. Ihimaera’s audience undoubtedly includes readers who find themselves inside and outside the elite set. He explains that conformity should not be the goal of a diverse society. Tuta decides to truly represent his mother, “Mrs. Simmons, Desiree Dawn, and the boys, Crazy Joe, Blackjack and Bigfoot” by behaving as a true Maori citizen at the ball. He thinks that outsiders will have to enter society “on their own terms. . . as the real people they [are] and not as carbon copies of the people already on the inside.” This message is directed at the socially elite and inferior alike.

Throughout the story, Tuta is for the readers a touchstone. He remains skeptical and reluctant to go along with the scheme whereas his coworkers, friends, and family members are excited about his invitation to the ball. His first reaction to the invitation is him considering it as a joke being played on him by one of his friends. In the end, he learns that it is a joke being played on him by society, especially by those who mock him at the ball. Tuta remains unimpressed by high society and its impractical concerns all through the story. He wonders why the meals at balls are served in courses when it makes more sense to “just stick all the kai on the table at once.” His well-grounded responses foreshadow his realization at the ball that fitting in should not entail acting like his oppressors.

Everyone in his circle who tries to prepare Tuta for the ball must go against his or her own grain in doing so. Tuta’s mother assumes the invitation as a summons to court and asks her son, “Oh, Tuta, what have you done?” However, she recommended him to make polite conversation at the ball. When she speaks in her own lingo to someone at Government House on the telephone, Mrs. Simmons betrays her own Maori roots. Tuta learns to dance with the help of his drag-queen friends in order to dance differently than they normally would. Not having found a suitable limousine to drive him to the ball, his friends festoon a Jaguar as if it is being used in a wedding. It is no wonder that Tuta has little objection to dancing with Joyce in spite of her unusual height; Desirée Dawn, a “six-foot transvestite”, had coached him to dance at the ball. He is most at home among outcasts.

A boy who is possibly in his early twenties, Tuta Wharepapa, works in a factory packing batteries. He receives an invitation from the Governor General to attend a ball at Government House, as a representant of his collegues. Tuta finds it quite challenging to turn into a fancy posh type of person, so he can be ready to attend the ball. Tuta is dancing with a lady, Joyce, he had meet at the ball who also feels ‘out of place’ towards the end of the text. Tuta realized, as he was about to leave,  that Joyce and himself both did not ‘fit in’ very well and decided to just beat them at their own game, as Tuta said “bloody hell, if you could not join them…then yes he could beat them if he wanted to”. Tuta realize they were both unique compared to everybody else and in some way when he noticed how tall Joyce was. But because of the obvious difference Tuta decided not to be ashamed of whom he is and be who you are. Tuta’s sudden realization that he should be himself and stop trying to be one of them shows that to readers.

Ihimaera’s collection retells Katherine Mansfield’s other famous short stories,  with Maori characters like Tuta Wharepapa in “His First Ball” (Mansfield’s “Her first ball”), or the two Maori women who have been arrested for kidnapping in « The Affectionate Kidnappers” (Mansfield’s “How Pearl Button was Kidnapped”); they are no longer the generic « fat and laughing » stereotypes of Mansfield’s original, but two desperate and vulnerable women  who have « gone into darkness, gone into the stomach of the Pakhea… eaten up by the white man”.

These characters are ragged between the old Maori ways and the dominant Pakeha-European-culture. This unavoidable and irresolvable clash is described by Ihimaera. However, his Maori characters are noble, wise, environmentally conscious and there is a probable modern-day’s fashion reflected by them. The other stories are quiet, domestic tales in which Maori and European alike scrutinize the rest of the world from the outside, with characters like the children in the distressing “This Life is Weary”(Mansfield’s « The Garden Party ») spending their Saturdays, hidden in the bushes, watching the activities of the lucky family that lives in “The Big House”.

The collection is rough in execution and ranges from the best to the ordinary despite the fact that some stories have echoes of Mansfield’s lyricism and look similar. Perhaps Mansfield never did more than drawing the novel, but Ihimaera interest’ is to emphasize differences between Maori and Pakeha (European alike) thinking and explore New Zealand’s literary as well as cultural history through Maori eyes. Instead of writing back to correct and reconstruct the story, Ihimaera pays homage to Mansfield’s art and life, he writes the stories again in order to celebrate them. We can assume that Ihimaera imitates Mansfield literary voice and retells variously Mansfield stories, in other stories, from the viewpoint of Maori or working-class, recreating the New Zealand, where she was born, accepting her in his own Maori tradition.

 

3.3.2. “How Pearl Button was Kidnapped/The affectionate kidnappers”: Pakeha vs Maori

 

The terrain on which contrastive analyses of rewriting are conducted has been altered by postcolonial rewriting since an aesthetic consideration, which assumes the occupation of an internally cohesive field by English literature, is not sufficient for writers bringing exterior cultural and literary perspectives. Within the politics of “writing back,” critics of postcolonial rewriting often look for aspects of the text that undermine its predecessor’s cultural and literary authority, a tendency opposed by Huggan’s and Appiah’s insistence on the need to acknowledge all cultural and literary input. Key texts read in a manner intending to deconstruct an imperial perspective include Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which centres the mad Bertha Rochester of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock, in which Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness journey to the interior is re-enacted multiple times until the South American jungle becomes assimilated and natural to a Creole imaginary. It is similarly within this optic of imaginative historiography (challenging not history but fiction) that commentaries on Dear Miss Mansfield argue that Ihimaera centralizes the barely discernible Maori and New Zealand referents of Mansfield’s stories. “The Affectionate Kidnappers”, which rewrites Mansfield’s “How Pearl Button was Kidnapped” from a Maori perspective, is perhaps the one story in Dear Miss Mansfield that most clearly and directly adopts a postcolonial stance of “writing back.” Mansfield’s Eurocentric vision is challenged by the story, by extension, by the Pakeha national literary perspective that has claimed Mansfield for its own. It is not surprising that this story is perhaps the most frequently cited in postcolonial comparisons of the two writers (Glage; Williams, “Beach”). A directly comparative reading of this story with Mansfield’s highlights the Maori writer’s ungainly efforts that, in their didacticism, leave little to the imagination.

 

“How Pearl Button was Kidnapped[40]” is a rare example of Katherine speaking with her own voice[41]. The story greatly differs from Mansfield’s later famous stories to the extent that it deals with New Zealandness in its treatment of a meeting of the Pakeha girl and the Maori people. Despite her strong interest in Maori people and culture, it is extremely rare to meet the interaction of the Pakeha and the Maori in Mansfield’s stories, and ‘Pearl Button’, for an early story, attracts considerable critical attention partly because of this theme. Moreover, the story is not merely a comfortable picture of a happy childhood (and neither are the later New Zealand stories). The story could be linked with brutality and shock as obviously suggested by the title, but it ironically shows at the end, brutality may be found in not exotic and uncanny people but more familiar ones, who ‘kidnap’ and take Pearl away from the place where she enjoys herself, although the story seems to be about the Maori people’s kidnapping of Pearl until a certain point, the child is never afraid of her “kidnappers” but instead experiences extreme happiness in her adventure with the unfamiliar people. It is Pearl’s own family and the police of her own community that (brutally, if you like) force her to return to the boring life in the “House of Boxes” and prevent her from being free and mobile. “How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped” suggests the similarities and connections between different types of people, the Pakeha and the Maori, adults and children. The story ‘draws the reader into the sunlit world of a New Zealand childhood which depends on the his/her evaluation of the idiosyncratic ways in which contrasted values are linked and reversed, as we are attempting to show here. It somehow looks peculiar that there are only three paragraphs even for this very short story: “the story opens as follows: Pearl Button swung on the little gate in front of the House of Boxes. It was the early afternoon of a sunshiny day with little winds playing hide and seek in it. They blew Pearl Button’s pinafore frill into her mouth and they blew the street dust all over the House of Boxes. Pearl watched it-like a cloud-like when mother peppered her fish and the top of the pepper-pot came off. She swung on the little gate, all alone, and she sang a small song. Two big women came walking down the street. One was dressed in red and the other was dressed in yellow and green”. Within Pearl’s consciousness (in fact, just like any other person’s), as suggested in this passage, no paragraphs sort things out appropriately. In other words, the story is told through Pearl’s consciousness, in which time is experienced as duration instead of measured or spatialized. The idea that one scene is followed by another is not at work in such a story. The similes, “like a cloud” and “like when mother peppered her fish and the top of the pepper-pot came off” just like the long and continuous paragraphs, also work for a similar purpose. In Pearl’s consciousness, those “different” things are compared and linked to each other.

Not only “appropriate” paragraphs but also other common marks for categorization are eliminated from the story as the way it is told is based on the child’s duration. We can quote as instance the act of taking a young child away without the permission of her parent, the race of the two big women, and “a great big piece of blue water” are left unidentified by Pearl (although the name of the last one is introduced by one of the women). Instead of following the intellectual identifications, the reader is invited to follow the child’s intuitive perception, that is, “kidnapping”, “the Maori”, and “sea” respectively.

Pearl shows her ability to give her own definition of what she is accustomed to although she might not know that the women she enjoys being with are called Maori people. When asked by a Maori woman where her mother is, she answers: “In the kitchen, ironing because it’s-Tuesday”. This immediate and automatic linking of ironing and Tuesday from Pearl shows, as innocent as it may seems, that she is also to some way familiar with an adult, with an intellectual way of identifying what she knows. There is a similar moment when he has to sit down on the dusty floor: “She carefully pulled up her pinafore and dress and sat on her petticoat as she had been taught to sit in dusty places”. Pearl instantly reacts to dust and links it to the best way of sitting in such a place and it comes as the result of her education. It is again shown in the part when she eats a peach which is offered by a Maori, she is worried about the juice she spills over her clothes. The adults’ influence on Pearl’s ‘good’ behaviour is suggested by the mention of her mother who is preoccupied with the routine housework when Pearl is taken by the Maori women, her mother who needs to wash Pearl’s clothes. The “tendency” that Pearl to be careful and polite could be associated to not only her family but her Pakeha origin. Her new friends from another culture do not seem to be concerned with the idea of spatialized time it very much while she is familiar with it (Tuesday for ironing). There is no explanation about how long it will take to get to their place to which the Maori women invite the girl by saying: “You coming with us, Pearl Button. We got beautiful things to show you”, Pearl has to walk a long way without knowing that the place is so far. The time Pearl wants to go home is not even asked by Maori women.

The tendency that Maori people do not manage the time in the same way as the Pakeha is commonly referred to in New Zealand. According to the Dictionaries of New Zealand English, “Takeha time” means “rigorous clock time », as distinct from the more flexible “Maori time” measured by human self-interest, convenience or need. It seems a relatively new expression, as the dictionary gives only two examples written in the 1980s, but Mansfield seems to show the difference between Pakeha time and Maori time in “How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped”

Mansfield also clearly indicates some strong ties between the Maori and Pearl even though she reveals the difference between the Maori and the Pakeha. The difference between these two types of intelligent beings, that is, Pearl and the Maori, and Pearl’s mother and the police, is that the former use not only intelligence but also intuition, while the latter focus on intelligence.

Later, we will see all the other distinctive features of the women, having no shoes and stockings on and walking slowly because they are fat. What attract Pearl in their first conversation are their white teeth. Later in the story, it is implied that Maori people were also impressed by Pearl’s colours that is her yellow curls and white neck. ‘Little blue men’, that is the qualification of the frightening people who are coming to ‘rescue’ Pearl, they are not identified as the police: “Little men in blue coats-little blue men came running, running towards her with shouts and whistling a crowd of little blue men to carry her back to the House of Boxes”. We could notice that different colors symbolize different aspects of life or different tendencies, as blue, for instance, being the color of the sea, which first frightens Pearl, and of the police, has a negative connotation, but what seems more significant is that Pearl changes the color of part of nature when she makes “a cup of her hands” and catches some water of the sea: “… it stopped being blue in her hands. She was so excited that she rushed over to her woman and flung her little thin arms round the woman’s neck, hugging her, kissing”. Her natural, or “organic”, tool, that is the cup of her hands, enables her to make a change to the nature. Although Pearl seems more innocent and mentally healthier than the other girl, both are “creators”. Pearl is obviously part of nature but at the same time she herself takes part in creating nature. Despite its appearance, “How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped” has themes such as the huge significance of evolution and human history.

 

“The Affectionate Kidnappers[42]” is a story of a group that Witi Ihimaera wrote as an affectionate homage to Katherine Mansfield in her centennial year. Those stories are not parodies but affectionate tributes inspired by her stories. Ihimaera’s aim is described by himself as to provide a modern response to the stories and timeless themes which were their inspiration. This story looks at Mansfield’s story How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped from the perspective of the Maori characters in it. Ihimaera wrote (in a note in Ihimaera: His Best Stories) that How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped is Mansfield’s only story where Maori characters are recognisable. Readers thought the kidnappers were gypsies when it was published in England. This story begins when two kuia (respected older women), Puti and Kuini, are being visited in jail by their chief, Hasbrick, who is also a Maori guide.  The two kuia describe how they saw the pretty little blonde girl swinging on a gate all alone by the hotel. We see events through their eyes as they explain their story. They said they felt sorry for the lonely little girl, Pearl Button, and took her to the local marae (meeting place) and the beach. The way the Pakeha (non-Maori) interpreted these actions is also seen through Hasbrick’s eyes contrary to what the policeman saw, Hasbrick thought. He made up the event in his mind…a Pakeha blonde girl, looking for the entire world as if she was going to be drowned by two black women. Puti and Kuini, the kuia, have to remain in the jail for the night but some of their people have gathered outside and they hear them singing in the darkness.

The imagery of encroaching darkness countered by the spoken and sung Maori, together create the simile of “syllables drift[ing] like two birds beating heavily eastward into the night”. The images of the birds and the night elevate the women’s capture and punishment to a poignant in its intense literariness, lyric finale that connects back with the ellipsis intended by Mansfield’s limited child-eye narration. For Mansfield readers, the italicized phrases signal Ihimaera’s borrowing from her original, in which “[l]ittle men in blue coats, little blue men came running, running towards her with shouts and whistling”. For readers who do not understand Maori, Kuini’s final words nevertheless successfully intimate the closure of the final sentence, while a sense of transcendence through nature is provided by the birds winging eastwards, into the morning light. For a Maori-literate audience, which includes many, but by no means all Maori, some non-Maori New Zealanders and foreigners interested in Maori culture and armed with a basic Maori dictionary, translating Kuini’s farewell “Goodbye, Pearl Button [. . .] my Pakeha grandchild” finally adds little to the already evident meaning. The epiphany in “The Affectionate Kidnappers” functions similarly in that in this pattern on the floor, the kuia understand the reason and consequence of their actions, and yet they are powerless to defend it. Whether the reader sees the symbol in the pattern or not, the story’s final message hinges on the kuia’s response to it: Kuini’s “still” voice, “drained of life” , and the heavy drifting syllables in effect foreshadow the closing sentence, “the light went, everything went, life went”. The irreconcilable tension between the epiphanic moment and the story’s prison setting is the ultimate elegiac source of this vision. For Ihimaera, the resulting schism between imagination and reality is based on a different sort of modernist rupture than that of in Mansfield’s which is the broken continuity in Maori culture brought by colonization. Traditional resources of cultural strength are no longer immediately available to many Maori in Pakeha-dominated contemporary New Zealand, having been broken by 150 years of colonization, and carrying little agency in mainstream society, an accumulation of losses described as a “fault line”by Ihimaera. Identified by Williams in an analysis of Ihimaera’s use of Mansfieldian epiphanies, a role of cultural critique is assumed by the Maori writer’s use of this device, as “such a moment of recognition in itself does not change the circumstances that provoke it” (“Beach” ms). The epiphany at the close of “The Affectionate Kidnappers” enacts this “fault line” in a textual way to the extent that its symbolic meaning cannot be accessed by many readers, as well as by the kuia who do understand the portent. It cannot prevent them from the Pakeha justice system where such symbolism is redundant.

The passage afore mentioned exemplifies Mukherjee’s argument by which Ihimaera’s modernism encompasses a Maori imaginary from another view, it targets a Maori readership instead of “writing back” to a colonial set text in which Mansfield’s vague sketch of the Maori might apply to Mukherjee’s sense of “deny[ing] [. . .] our humanity”. Ihimaera adopts the epiphany to write of Maoriness within a wholly European aesthetic device in keeping with Said’s affiliation of chosen influence, something he finds relevant and revealing regarding his own context. The tears of the albatross, a sacred weaving pattern incongruously found in a Pakeha prison uncover the signification of the “pattern in the dust” requiring an understanding of Maori symbolism, in which Kuini reveals “te roimata toroa”. The roimata toroa pattern evokes for Maori the tears shed for a loved one, and is selected “to depict disaster in war, death or catastrophe”[43].

Making some allusion of the myth of the sacred albatross returning from Aotearoa to Hawaiki is reiterated in the image of the “two birds beating heavily eastward into the night,” it symbolizes a journey towards the South Pacific site of both mythic origin and mythic return, as the spirit of the dead journeys back to Hawaiki. The premonition of the kuia’s death is indicated by the pattern, which the story’s final line intimated, “the light went, everything went, life went”. Across the different possible readings, the closing moment of Ihimaera retains knowledge or lack, thereof, in a literary context, of Modernist epiphany and Maori symbolism, rather than one of purposive cultural difference.

For Ihimaera, this means that there is compatibility between Maori imaginary and Western aesthetic form and function: as indicated by his authorial positioning in his two letters, his Maori “response” to Mansfield is far from being contrastive and exclusionist, instead it is inclusive and generative.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CONCLUSION

 

Ihimaera’s constantly changing, and often surprising fiction shifts between alternate positions, marked, at one end of the spectrum, by his highly respected and respectful Maori traditionalism in the tropes of indigenous difference, and at the other extreme, by his experimentation with genre, globalization and work that is not recognizably Maori. Ihimaera’s shifting eidolon relationship with Maori culture, as illustrated by his positions towards indigeneity and diaspora, serves as a model for an understanding of Maori cultural identity and its artistic expression as multiple and composite. Ihimaera’s fiction is equally well received by a Maori, New Zealand and international public due to his respected status and role as spokesman and ambassador for Maoritanga, each seeking and finding different aspects of Maori culture and identity in his work.

Witi Ihimaera’s 1989 collection of short stories has been critically neglected while he has been accepted as a spokesperson for the Maori literary community and most of his work has been discussed in critical circles. This is despite its significance as a considered statement of strategy and approach as part of the discourse of socio-cultural power relations in aboriginal-colonial interaction. There are two ways that the discourse functions in Ihimaera’s works of short fiction in Dear Miss Mansfield. The first one concerns the fact that since Katherine Mansfield is something of a cultural icon in Pakeha New Zealand, “writing back” to her allows Ihimaera to write back to the society as a whole. Secondly, the stories hold a role of the effectiveness of various strategies of resistance for minorities’ examination within the colonial environment of New Zealand. Ihimaera’s short stories’ preface explains his intention in Dear Miss Mansfield which is not to imitate Katherine Mansfield, “but, rather, to provide a modern response to the stories and the timeless themes that were inspiration”. The difference between Ihimaera and Mansfield is race; the focus of this text is based upon it. Ihimaera’s alteration canon is encouraged by his belief that “Maori people should be able to say for themselves what they want and not have that interpreted from them by the Pakeha in power. It is obvious that Mansfield treats those in minority positions in her fiction in an affirming way, but she cannot empower them with true voice as a comparatively privileged white woman.

Then Ihimaera rewrites some of Mansfield’s well-known New Zealand stories, including “The Garden Party”. “This Life Is Weary” is one of those stories in this collection in which explicitly shows challenge and re-inscription. “His first Ball”/”Her first Ball”, ‘The boy with the camer”/The woman at the store, “Summons to Alexandra”/”Bliss”, “The affectionate kidnappers”/”How Pearl Button was kidnapped” are among similar connections we seen in our work. It is sometimes important for Ihimaera to bring his history more and more close to the original, twisting around it like creeper then shoot out a stray branch in an unexpected direction by adding the small but poignant touches with meaning, yet perfectly in tune with the original.

We had to compare the writing works of a committed feminist and modern enough compared to where she lived, and those of a Maori leader, who is mainly tied closely to his culture and identity. Moreover, we can say that if the difference is, it is there. Actually, some concepts remained over time, but it is after all Ihimaera’s job to modernize works by reversals of topics that are previously discussed, and mainly those of a woman to whom he felt a particular affection.

APPENDICES: BIOGRAPHY

 

IHIMAERA, Witi (Witi Tame Ihimaera-Smiler) (1944–), novelist, short story writer, anthologist and librettist, was born in Gisborne. He has the distinction of being the first Maori writer to publish both a book of short stories and a novel. He is of Te Aitanga-a-Mahaki descent, with close affiliations to Tühoe, Te Whanau-a-Apanui, Ngati Kahungunu, and Ngai Tamanuhiri, and links to Rongowhakaata, Ngati Porou, and Te Whakatohea. His family marae is the family house of the Pere family, Rongopai, in Waituhi, near Gisborne. The extraordinary paintings, rather than carvings, decorating the meeting house’s interior, have been described in rich detail in his writing. Much of Ihimaera’s fiction is based on fact, but his work is never simply autobiographical. Waituhi, for example, the village setting for many of his narratives, is an imaginative recreation of the actual place. The fictional Waituhi’s ‘physical cohesion [providing] an “objective correlative” to the ethos that binds the tangata whenua together’.

His first book, published in 1972, was read by then Prime Minister Norman Kirk, who decided that Ihimaera would be valuable in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He began there in 1973 as a writer, producing the booklet Maori in 1975 and a film script: although the film, Maori (1981), is a promotional exercise with little resemblance to his original intentions. He remained with the ministry until 1989, apart from leave in 1975 to take up a Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago and, in 1982, the writing fellowship at Victoria University. During his time with Foreign Affairs he worked for the New Zealand High Commission in Canberra and spent four years in New York and Washington, two of them as New Zealand consul. Since 1990 he has lectured in the English department of Auckland University. In 1991 he was awarded a Scholarship in Letters and, in 1993, he travelled to France as the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellow. Ihimaera was interested in writing from an early age, and recalls scrawling stories across the whole wall of his room at the family farm at Whakarau. In 1969 he began writing seriously. His first story, ‘The Liar’, was accepted by the NZ Listener in May of the following year. From the start, he saw writing as a valuable opportunity to express in print his experience of being a Maori.

Ihimaera’s publications are often the products of intensive periods of writing. In London, in 1970, the short story collection Pounamu Pounamu (1972; awarded third prize in the Wattie Book of the Year Awards) and the two novels Tangi (1973; first prize in the Wattie Award) and Whanau (1974) were completed within a six-month period. The politics in these first books is implicit, and they primarily represent his horizontal view of the culture and history of his fictional Waituhi.

A second intensive period of writing took place when Ihimaera was Burns Fellow in 1975, and he wrote the more overtly political stories of The New Net Goes Fishing (1977) and began editing the anthology Into the World of Light (1982), the precursor to the extensive, five-volume, Te Ao Marama series. In December of that year, concerned that his work might be considered the ‘definitive portrayal of the world of the Maori’ when in his opinion it was ‘tragically out of date’, he determined to stop writing for a time. His fiction’s initial purpose, ‘to establish and describe the emotional landscape of the Maori people’, suddenly seemed to him less important than describing the political and social reality.

At Victoria University, with his politics now explicit and his ten-year embargo on his own writing ended, Ihimaera plunged ‘vertically’ into Waituhi’s culture and history, with the ‘past placed firmly in front’ of him, to write The Matriarch (1986), which again received the Wattie Book of the Year Award. He also produced the libretto for an opera by Ross Harris based on Whanau. The Whale Rider (1987) was written in New York and Cape Cod in the space of three weeks. A magical, mythical work about a young girl whose relationship with a whale ensures the salvation of her village, it is, says Ihimaera, the work of his ‘that the Maori community accepts best’. He followed this in 1989 with Dear Miss Mansfield, a response to the Katherine Mansfield centenary celebrations which rewrites her stories from a Maori perspective. Interestingly, this collection of experimental fiction was slated by New Zealand critics (who seemed to feel he had in some way molested a literary icon) but received excellent reviews internationally.

In 1996 Ihimaera’s writing moved in a significant new direction when he decided to foreground his sexuality and write a gay novel, Nights in the Gardens of Spain. To come out so explicitly was not an easy decision, but Ihimaera describes it as keeping faith with his gay audience as, in similar fashion, he attempts to keep faith with his Maori audience.

Central to Ihimaera’s fiction is the fact that the kaupapa he writes to has as its central goal the interpretation and reinterpretation of the concerns of the iwi from the viewpoint of the past. He sees himself as a Maori in the world, and thinks of ‘the world I’m in as being Maori, not European’. Just as he grew up in a society transforming from rural to urban, so his writing developed during another period of change when, in ‘the 1970s and ’80s [Maori] began to demand sovereignty’. The legacy of this period, Ihimaera suggests, is a ‘new strength of which Alan Duff is a beneficiary’.

Witi Ihimaera writes with a keen awareness of his cultural heritage, and a profound commitment to the values and traditions of his people. A central feature of his imaginative landscape is the whanau, or extended family community, an emotional and cultural bastion eroded by urbanization and social fragmentation. Writing with « both love and anger, » Ihimaera documents the traditional Maori way of life and the changes it has undergone since the coming of the Pakeha. Although his early works can be seen as pastoral and elegiac, Ihimaera does not idealize his subjects; rather, he renders their trials and conflicts, joys and sorrows, shortcomings and strengths, with remarkable honesty and clarity. Drawing upon the rich resources of Maori myth and legend, he blends the past with the present, evoking the ancestral framework of historical continuity that is an essential part of Maoritanga. His work proclaims the vitality and significance of New Zealand’s “other culture,” one that Ihimaera suggests enriches the lives of Maori and Pakeha alike.

 

Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp Murry was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield left for Great Britain in 1908 where she encountered Modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf with whom she became close friends. Her stories often focus on moments of disruption and frequently open rather abruptly. Among her most well-known stories are « The Garden Party », « The Daughters of the Late Colonel » and « The Fly. » During the First World War Mansfield contracted extrapulmonary tuberculosis, which rendered any return or visit to New Zealand impossible and led to her death at the age of 34.  Mansfield was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp, in 1888, into a socially prominent family in Wellington, New Zealand. The daughter of a banker and born to a middle-class colonial family, she was also a first cousin of author Countess Elizabeth von Arnim. Mansfield had two older sisters and a younger brother, born in 1894. Her father, Harold Beauchamp, went on to become the chairman of the Bank of New Zealand and was also knighted. The Mansfield family moved to Karori in 1893, where Mansfield would spend the happiest years of her childhood; she later used her memories of this time as an inspiration for the Prelude story.

Her first published stories appeared in the High School Reporter and the Wellington Girls’ High School magazine (the family returned to Wellington proper in 1898), in 1898 and 1899. She became enamoured with a cellist, Arnold Trowell (Mansfield herself was an accomplished cellist, having received lessons from Trowell’s father), in 1902, although the feelings were largely unreciprocated. Mansfield wrote, in her journals, of feeling alienated to some extent in New Zealand, and, in general terms, of how she became disillusioned due to the repression of the Māori people, who were often portrayed in a sympathetic or positive light in her later stories, such as How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped.

She moved to London in 1903, where she attended Queen’s College, along with her two sisters. Mansfield recommenced playing the cello, an occupation that she believed, during her time at Queen’s, she would take up professionally, but she also began contributing to the school newspaper, with such a dedication to it that she eventually became editor during this period. She was particularly interested in the works of the French Symbolists and Oscar Wilde, and she was appreciated amongst peers for her vivacious and charismatic approach to life and work. She met fellow writer Ida Baker (also known as Lesley Moore), a South African, at the college, and the pair became lifelong friends. Mansfield did not become involved in much political activity when she lived in London; for example, she did not actively support the suffragette movement in the UK (women in New Zealand had gained the right to vote in 1893).

Mansfield first began journeying into continental Europe from 1903–1906, mainly to Belgium and Germany. After finishing her schooling in England, Mansfield returned to her New Zealand home in 1906, only then beginning to write short stories. She had several works published in the Native Companion (Australia), which was her first paid writing work, and by this time she had her mind set on becoming a professional writer. It was also the first occasion on which she used the pseudonym ‘K. Mansfield’. She rapidly wearied of the provincial New Zealand lifestyle, and of her family, during this time, and two years later headed again for London. Her father sent her an annual subsidy of £100 for the rest of her life. In later years, she would express both admiration and disdain for New Zealand in her journals, and she was never able to visit there again, partly due to her tuberculosis.

Mansfield had two lesbian relationships during this period, notable for their pre-eminence in her journal entries. Mansfield biographer Angela Smith has said that this is evidence of her « transgressive impetus », although Mansfield continued to have male lovers, and attempted to repress her feelings at certain times. Her first relationship was with Maata Mahupuku, a half-Māori girl whom Mansfield had first met in Wellington, and then again in London. In June 1907 she wrote: « I want Maata, I want her as I have had her, terribly. This is unclean I know but true. » The second relationship, with Edith Kathleen Bendall, took place from 1906 to 1908, and Mansfield also professed her adoration for her in her journals.

Mansfield spent her last years seeking increasingly unorthodox cures for her tuberculosis. In February 1922, she consulted the Russian physician Ivan Manoukhin. His « revolutionary » treatment, which consisted of bombarding her spleen with X-rays, caused Mansfield to develop heat flashes and numbness in her legs.

The Dictionary of National Biography reports that she now came to feel that her attitude to life had been unduly rebellious, and she sought, during the days that remained to her, to renew and compose her spiritual life. In October 1922, Mansfield moved to Georges Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, France, where she was under the care of Olgivanna Lazovitch Hinzenburg (later, Mrs. Frank Lloyd Wright). Mansfield suffered a fatal pulmonary haemorrhage in January 1923, after running up a flight of stairs to show Murry how well she was. She died on January 9 and was buried in a cemetery in the Fontainebleau District in the town of Avon.

Mansfield proved to be a prolific writer in the final years of her life, and much of her prose and poetry remained unpublished at her death. Murry took on the task of editing and publishing her works.

His efforts resulted in two additional volumes of short stories in 1923 (The Dove’s Nest) and in 1924 (Something Childish), the publication of her Poems, The Aloe, as well as a collection of critical writings (Novels and Novelists) and a number of editions of Mansfield’s previously unpublished letters and journals.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

PRIMARY SOURCES

 

1. Ellis, Juniper. “Interview with Witi Ihimaera.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 34(1), 1999, 169-182.

 

1. Ihimaera, Witi. Te Ao Marama: Contemporary Maori Writing. Auckland: Reed Books, 1990-1996.

 

1. Lawlor, P. A. The Mystery of Maata: A Katherine Mansfield Novel. Wellington: The Beltane Book Bureau, 1946. Print.

 

1. Huggan, Graham, 1989. “Opting out of the (critical) common market: Creolization and the post-colonnial text”. Kunapipi 11(1): 29.

 

1. Katherine Mansfield, (1912). « Explanatory notes ». Selected Stories. Oxford World’s Classics.

 

1. Witi (Tame) Ihimaera, (2003).  « The Boy With the Camera », Contemporary Literary Criticism, volume(s) 329:271.

 

1. Mansfield Katherine, Her First Ball, 192-202. Katherine Mansfield, TheGarden Party and Other Stories, Penguin Books, 1951.

 

1. Katherine Mansfield, “The Little Governess,” Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield (London: Cons­ table and Company Ltd., 1945), P- 183- Hereafter cited as Stories.

 

1. Mansfield Katherine, The Garden Party, Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party and Other Stories, Penguin Books, 1951, p. 248.

 

1. Mansfield, K. (2000). The garden party. In J. McRae (Ed.), The garden party and other stories: Stories finished and unfinished (pp. 123-138). London: Penguin.

 

1. Fullbrook, K. (1986). Key women writers. Brighton: Harvester.

 

1. McRae, J. (2000). Introduction. In K. Mansfield, The garden party and other stories: Stories finished and unfinished (pp. vii-xiii). London: Penguin.

 

1. Magalaner, M. (1971). The fiction of Katherine Mansfield. London: Feffer & Simons.

 

1. Séllei, N. (1996). Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A personal and professional bond. Frankfurt am Mair: Peter Lang.

 

1. Burgan, M. (1994). Illness, gender, and writing: The case of Katherine Mansfield. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.

 

1. Smith, A. (2000). Katherine Mansfield: A literary life. Houndmills: Palgrave.

 

1. Cooke, J. (2008). Katherine Mansfield’s ventriloquism and the faux-ecstasy of all manner of flora. LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, 19(1), 79-94.

 

1. Brian J. Murton, (2008). Waituhi: A Place in Maori New Zealand, New Zealand Geographer, Volume 35, Issue 1, pages 24–33, April 1979.

 

1. Lutwack, Leonard, (1984), The Role of Place in Literature, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, p. 31.

 

1. Hankin, C. A., (1963), Katherine Mansfield and her Confessional Stories, New York: St. Martin‟s Press, p. 236.

 

1. de Vries, Ad, (1974), Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery, Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing  Company, p. 298.

 

1. Sam Hynes, “The Defeat of the Personal” in The Critical Response to Katherine Mansfield, ed. by Jan Pilditch (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1996), p. 68.

 

1. Cheleen Ann-Catherine Mahar, “Landscape, Empire and the Creation of Modern New Zealand” in Landscape and Empire: 1770-2000, ed. by Glenn Hooper (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), p. 76.

 

1. Jeffrey Meyers, Katherine Mansfield: A Darker View (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002).

 

1. Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two, p. 7.

 

1. Brock, Richard, 2006. “Disapprobation, Disobedience and the Nation in Katherine Mansfield’s New  Zealand Stories” in Journal of New Zealand Literature, vol. 24, No 1, p. 1.

 

1. Katherine Mansfield, (1924). Bliss and over stories. William Brendon And Son Limited.

 

1. Davin, D. M. Katherine Mansfield in Her Letters. Wellington: School Publication Branch Department of Education, 1959.

 

1. Walter E. Anderson, “The Hidden Love Triangle in Mansfield’s ‘Bliss” in Twentieth Century Literature, Volume 28, No. 4, winter, 1982, pp. 397–403.
2. Walter E. Anderson, ‘‘The Hidden Love Triangle in Mansfield’s ‘Bliss” in Twentieth Century Literature, Volume 28, No. 4, winter, 1982, pp. 397–403.

 

1. Durix, C. F. Both sides of the broad road in Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” and Witi Ihimaera’s “This Life is Weary.” In Michel & Dupuis.

 

1. Diane McGee, Writing the Meal: Dinner in the Fiction of Early Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), p. 118.

 

1. Roazen, P. (1983). “As if” and politics. Political Psychology, 4(4), 685-692.

 

1. McRae, J. (2000). Introduction. In K. Mansfield, The garden party and other stories: Stories finished and unfinished (pp. vii-xiii). London: Penguin.

 

1. James Belich, Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders From the 1880s to the Year 2000 (Auckland: Penguin, 2001), pp. 53-86; pp. 394-404; pp. 547-9.

 

1. Colin McGeorge, “Race, Empire and the Maori in the New Zealand Primary School Curriculum 1880-1940”, in The Imperial Curriculum: Rata/Images and Education in the British Colonial Experience ed. by J.A. Mangan (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 64-78; and “What was Our Nation’s Story”? New Zealand Primary School History, Textbooks Between the Wars’, History of Education Review 28: 2 (1999), 46-59.

 

1. Steven Webster, Patrons of Maori Culture: Powe; Theory and Ideology in the Maori Renaissance (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1998), pp. 74-98.

 

1. Waitangi Day, 1934, can be found at http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/politics/waitangi-ngapuhi1934

 

1. Mansfleld, Katherine. Collected Stories, (London, 1945). 339-40

 

1. Mansfield, Katherine 1912. “How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped”, Rhythm, 2 (4).

 

1. Woods, Joanna 2001. Kwrina: The Russian Morld ofKatherine Mansfield, Auckland: Penguin

 

1. Witi Ihimaera. (1989). ‘The Affectionate Kidnappers. “Dear Miss Mansfield: A Tribute to Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp”. Auckland: Viking, p. 118.

 

1. Auckland Museum Education Kit at www.aucklandmuseum.com/site_resources/EducationPDF/Maori_03TukuTukuEdKit.pdf, 2007.

 

SECONDARY SOURCES

 

Froude Durix, Carole. “Point Counterpoint: Both Sides of the Broad Road in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’ and Witi Ihimaera’s ‘This Life is Weary’.” The Fine Instrument: Essays on Katherine Mansfield. Ed. Paulette Michel and Michel Dupuis. Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 2001, 175-186.

 

Glage, Liselotte. “Rewriting or Writing Back? Witi Ihimaera’s Dear Miss Mansfield.” Crabtracks: Progress in Teaching the New Literatures. Cross/Cultures 59, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002, 321-329.

 

Isernhagen, Hartwig. “Why Novels? Why Short Stories? A Note on the Use of Genres in the Works of Witi Ihimaera and Albert Wendt.”Commonwealth 16(2), 1993, 34-37.

 

Jannetta, Armando E. “Textual Strategies of Identity Formation in Witi Ihimaera’s Fiction.” Commonwealth 12(2), 1990, 17-28.

 

Evans, Patrick. “Pakeha-style biculturalism and the Maori writer.” Journal of New Zealand Literature, 24(1) 2006, 11-35.

 

O’Sullivan, Vincent. “‘Finding the Pattern, Solving the Problem’: Katherine Mansfield: The New Zealand European.” Katherine Mansfield: In from the Margins. Ed. Roger Robinson. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1994.

 

Wevers, Lydia. “Short Fiction by Maori Writers.” Commonwealth 16(2), Spring 1993, 26-33.

 

Butcher, Margot. “What is Maori? Who is Pakeha?” North and South August 2003, 37-47.

 

Corballis, Richard and Simon Garrett. Introducing Witi Ihimaera. Auckland: Longman Paul, 1984.

 

Ojinmah, Umelo. Witi Ihimaera: A Changing Vision. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1993.

 

Reed, A. W., compiled. Concise Maori Dictionary. Sixth Edition. Auckland: Reed, 2001.

 

Tomalin, Claire. Katherine Mansfield: Secret Life. London: Virago, 1987.

 

Neaman, Judith S. “Allusion, Image, and Associative Pattern: The Answers in Mansfield´s Bliss.” In: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 32, No. 2 Summer, 1986, 242-254.

 

Dunbar, Pamela.  Radical Mansfield: Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories. London: Macmillan, 1997.

 

Tiffany, Potter. A view of strategies of assimilation and resistance in Witi Ihimaera’s Dear miss Mansfield. World Literature Written in English, Volume 33, Issue 2, 1993.

 

Kundu, Rama. “Witi Ihimaera ‘Re-Writing’ Katherine Mansfield”. Studies in Postcolonial Literature. Ed. M. Q., Khan; Bijay, Kumar Das. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2007, 107-125.

 

Ashcroft, Bill. Gareth, Griffiths. Helen, Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989.

 

 

 

[1] Ellis, Juniper. “Interview with Witi Ihimaera.” The Journal of  Commonwealth Literature 34(1), 1999, 169-182.

[2] Ihimaera, Witi. Te Ao Marama: Contemporary Maori Writing. Auckland: Reed Books, 1990-1996.

[3] Lawlor, P. A. The Mystery of Maata: A Katherine Mansfield Novel. Wellington: The Beltane Book Bureau, 1946. Print.

[4] Huggan, Graham, 1989. “Opting out of the (critical) common market: Creolization and the post-colonnial text”. Kunapipi 11(1): 29.

[5] Katherine Mansfield, (1912). « Explanatory notes ». Selected Stories. Oxford World’s Classics.

[6] Witi (Tame) Ihimaera, (2003).  « The Boy With the Camera », Contemporary Literary Criticism, volume(s) 329:271.

 

[7] Mansfield Katherine, Her First Ball, 192-202. Katherine Mansfield, TheGarden Party and Other Stories, Penguin Books, 1951.

[8] Katherine Mansfield, « The Little Governess, « Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield (London: Cons­ table and Company Ltd., 1945), P- 183- Hereafter cited as Stories.

[9] Mansfield Katherine, The Garden Party, Katherine Mansfield, TheGarden Party and Other Stories, Penguin Books, 1951, p. 248.

[10] Mansfield, K. (2000). The garden party. In J. McRae (Ed.), The garden party and other stories: Stories finished and unfinished (pp. 123-138). London: Penguin.

[11] Fullbrook, K. (1986). Key women writers. Brighton: Harvester.

[12] McRae, J. (2000). Introduction. In K. Mansfield, The garden party and other stories: Stories finished and unfinished (pp. vii-xiii). London: Penguin.

[13] Magalaner, M. (1971). The fiction of Katherine Mansfield. London: Feffer & Simons.

[14] Séllei, N. (1996). Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A personal and professional bond. Frankfurt am Mair: Peter Lang.

[15] Burgan, M. (1994). Illness, gender, and writing: The case of Katherine Mansfield. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP.

[16] Smith, A. (2000). Katherine Mansfield: A literary life. Houndmills: Palgrave.

[17] Cooke, J. (2008). Katherine Mansfield’s ventriloquism and the faux-ecstasy of all manner of flora. LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, 19(1), 79-94.

[18] Brian J. Murton, (2008). Waituhi: A Place in Maori New Zealand, New Zealand Geographer, Volume 35, Issue 1, pages 24–33, April 1979.

[19] Lutwack, Leonard, (1984), The Role of Place in Literature, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, p. 31.

[20] Hankin, C. A., (1963), Katherine Mansfield and her Confessional Stories, New York: St. Martin‟s Press, p. 236.

[21] de Vries, Ad, (1974), Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery, Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing  Company, p. 298.

[22] Sam Hynes, “The Defeat of the Personal” in The Critical Response to Katherine Mansfield, ed. by Jan Pilditch

(Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1996), p. 68.

[23] Cheleen Ann-Catherine Mahar, „Landscape, Empire and the Creation of Modern New Zealand‟ in Landscape

and Empire: 1770-2000, ed. by Glenn Hooper (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), p. 76.

[24] Jeffrey Meyers, Katherine Mansfield: A Darker View (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002).

[25] Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two, p. 7.

[26] Brock, Richard, 2006. “Disapprobation, Disobedience and the Nation in Katherine Mansfield’s New  Zealand Stories” in Journal of New Zealand Literature, vol. 24, No 1, , p. 1.

 

[27] Katherine Mansfield, (1924). Bliss and over stories. William Brendon And Son Limited.

[28] Davin, D. M. Katherine Mansfield in Her Letters. Wellington: School Publication Branch Department of Education, 1959.

 

[29] Walter E. Anderson, ‘‘The Hidden Love Triangle in Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’’’ in Twentieth Century Literature, Volume 28, No. 4, winter, 1982, pp. 397–403.

[30] Walter E. Anderson, ‘‘The Hidden Love Triangle in Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’’’ in Twentieth Century Literature, Volume 28, No. 4, winter, 1982, pp. 397–403.

[31] Durix, C. F. Both sides of the broad road in Katherine Mansfield‟s “The Garden Party” and Witi Ihimaera‟s “This Life is Weary.” In Michel & Dupuis.

[32] Diane McGee, Writing the Meal: Dinner in the Fiction of Early Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 2001), p. 118.

[33] Roazen, P. (1983). “As if” and politics. Political Psychology, 4(4), 685-692.

[34] McRae, J. (2000). Introduction. In K. Mansfield, The garden party and other stories: Stories finished and unfinished (pp. vii-xiii). London: Penguin.

[35] James Belich, Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders From the 1880s to the Year 2000 (Auckland: Penguin, 2001), pp. 53-86; pp. 394-404; pp. 547-9.

[36] Colin McGeorge, ‘Race, Empire and the Maori in the New Zealand Primary School Curriculum 1880-1940’, in The Imperial Curriculum: Rata/Images and Education in the British Colonial Experience ed. by J.A. Mangan (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 64-78; and ‘What was « Our Nation’s Story »? New Zealand Primary School History, Textbooks Between the Wars’, History of Education Review 28: 2 (1999), 46-59.

[37] Steven Webster, Patrons of Maori Culture: Powe,; Theory and Ideology in the Maori Renaissance (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1998), pp. 74-98.

[38] Waitangi Day, 1934, can be found at http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/politics/waitangi-ngapuhi1934

[39] Mansfleld. Kathcrine.Collected Stories, (London, 1945). 339-40

[40] Mansfield, Katherine 1912. “How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped”, Rhythm, 2 (4).

[41] Woods, Joanna 200 1. Kwrina: The Russian Morld ofKatherine Mansfield, Auckland: Penguin

 

[42] Witi Ihimaera. (1989). ‘The Affectionate Kidnappers.’ Dear Miss Mansfield: A Tribute to Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp. Auckland: Viking, p. 118.

[43] Auckland Museum Education Kit at www.aucklandmuseum.com/site_resources/EducationPDF/Maori_03TukuTukuEdKit.pdf, 2007.