Modernist Soundscape in Katherine Mansfield’s “The Wind Blows”

Abstract

This paper focuses on the extent of soundscape in shaping individuality in selected short stories of Katherine Mansfield. Shifting from New Zealand to England, she explores not only the opportunity it renders but also the anxiety it pushes forward. Whereas many modernist authors traverse the human condition from diversified perspectives, Mansfield does it from her own experience rooted in geographic relocation. In a number of her epiphanic short stories, soundscape has a crucial functionality in deciphering the psychology of an individual in the juncture of modernity. She optimises sound circumferentially so that a character can have silent auditory experience or voiced impression of individual consciousness. Sound helps one determine how one can respond to certain elements in a given or lived space and time. Such response can be mesmerizing as in "The Wind Blows." In other words, sound, in its variegated form, helps denominate social interaction and discrete sensation through the blending of audible and inaudible engagement or detachment as exemplified in a particular soundscape. This paper aims to find the scope of soundscape in fashioning a character within the domain of modernist spatiality and temporality.