Modernist/Provincial/Pacific: Christina Stead, Katherine Mansfield and the Expatriate Home Ground (2013)

In Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (2006), Rebecca Walkowitz identifies a brand of 'critical cosmopolitanism' inherent in the work of British modernists such as Joyce, Conrad and Woolf. She argues that their critical awareness of the transnational dimensions of modernity operates at the level of literary style, where their writing, for example, 'disorients the conventions of national literature and cultural distinctiveness by adding new experiences' and thus both enhance and disable local points of view (2). Walkowitz's delineation of this critical transnationalism operating at the imperial centre encourages us to ask the equally pressing question about transnational modernism articulated from the imperial periphery or indeed between imperial centre and periphery. In particular, settler-colonial expatriate woman modernists are a key category of writers working from the other direction (as it were) because they provide unsettling and critically disorienting visions of the local. In this sense and in many others, the modernist writing by expatriate women that emerged from provincial and regional points of origin, often written between national centres and between centre and periphery, has a great deal to add to contemporary discussions of the transnational, the modernist and the colonial. This paper will investigate the powerful, disruptive and often experimental return to home ground in the shape of Christina Stead and Katherine Mansfield's modernist narratives about their provincial cities of origin on the Pacific Rim. This paper takes as its starting point Christina Stead's early work, Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), in order to examine Stead's participation in both Pacific and transnational modernism in her rendition of Sydney. Katherine Mansfield's earlier New Zealand story, 'The Woman in the Store' (1912), will provide further and quite different material for Pacific-oriented speculation about the nature of the expatriate modernist woman's worldly recuperation of her colonial hometown.Seven Poor Men of Sydney, Christina Stead's first novel, was composed before, during and after her expatriate voyage from Sydney to London in 1928. Composition of the early drafts of this novel functioned as part of Stead's intense literary ambition and equally intense willed survival, and as she went on to redraft the novel in London in 1928 and Paris 1929-1934, it became a practice that stabilised the disorienting terrain between the inside and the outside of nation space and the realities of her longed-for mobility between provincial colonial city and imperial centre(s). The inside/outside geography of expatriate experience is explicitly figured in the opening scenes of Stead's 'Sydney' novel, where Stead returns with powerful imaginative focus to her home-town, indeed to her provincial harbourside scene of departure. This is not a nostalgic return but a worldly one, where the settler colonial relation to the wider world is acknowledged in the city's fundamental orientation (economic and geographical) to the epic world of global shipping:Early in the morning, through the open window, the people hear the clatter of anchors falling into the bay, and the little boys run out to name the liners waiting there for the port doctor, liners from Singapore, Shanghai, Nagasaki, Wellington, Hawaii, San Francisco, Naples, Brindisi, Dunkirk and London, in the face of all these old stone houses, decayed weatherboard cottages, ruinous fences, boathouses and fishermen's shanties. (Stead, Seven Poor Men 2)It is the confrontation between the endlessly mobile capital of global/colonial trade and the local scenes of everyday poverty and marginality that may be the consequences of this trade with which Stead's opens her first expatriate work. Her list of ports moves from the Pacific Rim first and foremost, arriving rather patchily at certain northern ports, producing a sequence that inverts the normative imperial direction of north to south and centre to periphery. …