THE week after was one of the busiest weeks of their lives. Even when they went to bed it was only their bodies that lay down and rested; their minds went on, thinking things out, talking things over, wondering, deciding, trying to remember where . . .
Constantia lay like a statue, her hands by her sides, her feet just overlapping each other, the sheet up to her chin. She stared at the ceiling.
“Do you think father would mind if we gave his top-hat to the porter?”
“The porter?” snapped Josephine. “Why ever the porter? What a very extraordinary idea!”
“Because,” said Constantia slowly, “he must often have to go to funerals. And I noticed at–at the cemetery that he only had a bowler.” She paused. “I thought then how very much he’d appreciate a top-hat. We ought to give him a present, too. He was always very nice to father.”
“But,” cried Josephine, flouncing on her pillow and staring across the dark at Constantia, “father’s head!” And suddenly, for one awful moment, she nearly giggled. Not, of course, that she felt in the least like giggling. It must have been habit. Years ago, when they had stayed awake at night talking, their beds had simply heaved. And now the porter’s head, disappearing, popped out, like a candle, under father’s hat. . . . The giggle mounted, mounted; she clenched her hands; she fought it down; she frowned fiercely at the dark and said “Remember” terribly sternly.
“We can decide tomorrow,” she said.
Constantia had noticed nothing; she sighed.
“Do you think we ought to have our dressing-gowns dyed as well?”
“Black?” almost shrieked Josephine.
“Well, what else?” said Constantia. “I was thinking–it doesn’t seem quite sincere, in a way, to wear black out of doors and when we’re fully dressed, and then when we’re at home–”
“But nobody sees us,” said Josephine. She gave the bedclothes such a twitch that both her feet became uncovered and she had to creep up the pillows to get them well under again.
“Kate does,” said Constantia. “And the postman very well might.”
Josephine thought of her dark-red slippers, which matched her dressing-gown, and of Constantia’s favourite indefinite green ones which went with hers. Black! Two black dressing-gowns and two pairs of black woolly slippers, creeping off to the bathroom like black cats
The opening moments of Katherine Mansfield’s celebrated short story The Daughters of the Late Colonel combines the surreal with the tragically alarming, for the reader enters the world of the ‘daughters’ uncertain as to our bearings around two characters whose behaviors seem childish and ‘lost’ – even out of time.
The euphemistic opening,”The week after”suggests an insider’s perspective, as the word ‘after’ relates to something the narrator knows about,but we as newcomers to the tale do not know Our outsider status disorientates us and intensifies the slightly eccentric tone adopted by the third person narrator, who playfully weaves in and out of the consciousnesses of the two sisters.
The repeated use of the present participle in the first paragraph gives the hectic activity a sort of innate contradiction as the activity takes place in a form of busy suspended animation! If you look at the participles, they are gorgeously inactive despite their ‘busy’ facade. All that is going on remains in the naive minds of the sisters.
Katherine Mansfield’s love of ambivalence is perfectly captured here and the story creates a dream like space in which the sisters go ‘ a wondering’ with their unworldly and yet strangely liberated minds. They are wonderful writers whose writing is only accessed by readers because of KM’s narratorial visitation!
For their patriarchal father has died, ironically liberating them into a world they have no experience of in any practical way. Nor do the sisters enjoy any real comprehension of the behaviors of this world which has previously existed on the periphery of their consciousness.
The ironic simile ‘like a statue’ which is used to describe Constantia, is suggestive both of a child’s game as well as her tomb like existence and adds complex comic pathos to her situation. It also makes the exact age of the sisters rather difficult to fathom, once again like the use of present participles suggesting lives that have not been allowed to develop or mature, due to their father’s oppressive control.
When the sisters explore the black ‘hat’ of their father and imaginatively pass it around in terms of possible wearers, we feel we are in Magritte/Dali territory! Indeed the metonymical fixation with father’s hat, which is then extended to their own slippers, communicates a bizarre reevaluation of duty and appropriateness!
One of the most brilliant stories of the Twentieth century and all the more admirable because the story uses the comic to explore lost lives.
They are in mourning and yet do not realise what they are in mourning for-their own lost lives.
Excellent reading of a brilliant short story – a new tone in the short story, something modern, a tragi-comedy with the tragedy replaced with ……? Something brilliant, distinctive but elusive. You write about it very well. Bravo!
Sally