IT seemed to the little crowd on the wharf that she was never going to move again. There she lay, immense, motionless on the grey crinkled water, a loop of smoke above her, an immense flock of gulls screaming and diving after the galley droppings at the stern. You could just see little couples parading–little flies walking up and down the dish on the grey crinkled tablecloth. Other flies clustered and swarmed at the edge. Now there was a gleam of white on the lower deck–the cook’s apron or the stewardess perhaps. Now a tiny black spider raced up the ladder on to the bridge.
Mansfield opens ‘The Stranger’ with a perspective that suggests paralysis and decay. The narrator selects details that reinforce an implied rottenness and even impending death. All glimpsed humanity is here reduced to parody. This is a world diminished and insect -like where activity appears futile and absurd. The defamiliarising tone and detail create a ‘strangeness’ that will prove peculiarly relevant to the story, for this is a story which explores the irrevocable loss of the familar. Indeed it suggests that apparent intimacy is illusory and even a seemingly proximate relationship like marriage masks final separation and unassuaged loneliness.
At this point we share the point of view of the protagonist, a male expecting the return of his wife from a long voyage. That which seems initially small and distant becomes steadily human and familiar, only to become distant and unfamilar again as revelations occur. This oscillation between intimacy and distance is centred through the focalisation upon Hammond, the husband. By contrast, ‘Janey’ his wife, remains elusive. She escapes us, just as she escapes her husband. Her interiority remins her own possession and the cloying and proprietorial sexuality of Hammond cannot ‘possess’ his wife in any way; her autonomy remains. Her emotional connectedness to another endures and Mansfield finishes the tale with images of estrangement and horror. He is the stranger, even unto himself.