DIANA TRILLING
513
sen sibility, that tiresome twentieth- century offshoot of the heroine of
spi rit, was British-born , in the short stories o f Ka therine Mansfi eld.
Miss Mansfi eld put herself to school to Chekhov but apparentl y on the
way home lost on e of the chief lesson s h e had to teach h er, tha t even the
sho rt literary fo rm provides space for a world bi gger than tha t of th e
observin g and recording self. In any a ttempt to put the novel of female
libera tion in hi storical perspective one cannot overl ook the career of
categori cal fema le poeticism in thi s century. Sensibility-I speak of it
here no t as an a ttribute of the literary a rt but as its own litera ry mode–
has an interesting hi story.
It
came into vogue a t the same time as
sexo logies, the new ma rriage and sex manuals-Van der Velde's was
perhaps the most widely known o f them-which in the first decades of
the twenti eth century es tabli shed the two-faced idea tha t women had
full membership with men in the animal kingdom but tha t they were
its more deli cate and precarious inhabitants, in need of special han–
dling. T he mode o f sen sibility also co incided with a substanti al leap
forwa rd in the development of the modern depa rtment store and of the
dark arts of merchandi sing. " Have you tha t cheri shed look?" Bonwit
Tell er would soon inquire o f its female customers, whil e writers as
g ift ed as Elizabeth Bowen in England and Eudora Welty in this
country, or as remote from each o ther as Anais Nin and Carson
McCull ers, indul ged a delicacy of perception and prose not in appro–
p ri a te to a sex whose precio usness had been so- to-s peak medi ca ll y
legitimized . For reason s not too diffi cult to trace, thi s tremul ous style
especiall y es tabli shed itself in our emba ttl ed South where to some
extent it remains even today the favored method for writing abou t
idi o ts, orp hans, decayed gentl ewomen , and o ther minority groups.
Altho ugh , in England, Virg ini a Woolf inclined toward an excess ive
sensibility, she n ever went over tha t edge; perhaps it was the eliti st
intell ectual solidarity of Bloomsbury tha t saved her. And the new ly
rev ived work of J ean Rhys is, I think , improperl y understood if it is
tho ught to bear poeti c witness to the p light of sensiti ve womankind.
T he ex traordin ary novels of J ean Rh ys, originall y published in th e la te
twenti es and in the thirti es, are fa r from bein g exercises in fema le
literary na rciss ism; she dea ls with something much more palpabl e, the
hard terror of p sychologica l isola ti on . All of them have essenti all y the
same chi ef cha racter; in
Aft er L eaving Mr. Mackenzie,
which is perhaps
the bes t of the books, thi s is a woman who drifts aiml ess ly, almost
ca ta toni call y, from ba r to bar in Pa ri s, cut o ff from all human
rela ti on ships excep t as she responds to the random proddings of sexual
des ire. She is a gentl e and courteous woman , thi s character, even
