This chapter examines Katherine Mansfield’s legacy for the development of a New Zealand national literature, as reflected in the social realist short stories of Frank Sargeson. It contests the conventional view that Mansfield’s metropolitan impressionism was ‘inimical’ to Sargeson’s ‘ambitions for a cultural nationalism’, arguing that Mansfield’s legacy is not only a burden to be overcome but an ‘intertextual presence’, as the two writers share a critique of colonial culture and its normative gender constructions and key techniques of literary modernism. Focusing on ‘The Canary’ (1923) and ‘A Man and his Wife’ (1939), Wilson argues that Sargeson adapted Mansfield’s ‘techniques of impressionism and impersonation’ to render masculine homosexual vulnerability and unrequited love in a homophobic society. Mansfield’s influence on Sargeson, then, suggests ‘continuity across the decades of New Zealand’s cultural nationalism’.
The ‘Burden’ of the Feminine: Frank Sargeson’s Encounter with Katherine Mansfield