The” art” of loving oneself
In "Mr. Reginald Peacock’s Day," Katherine Mansfield uses a third-person heterodiegetic narrator with limited internal focalization—centered almost exclusively on Peacock—to create an ironic distance between the protagonist and the reader. Since we are denied the internal perspectives of his wife, son, and students, we are never invited to accept Peacock’s self-aggrandizing worldview. Instead, this narrative filter allows readers to dismantle his self-deceptions layer by layer, exposing the deep gulf between his inflated self-image and his actual reality.
The opening paragraph thrushes us right away into Mr Reginald Peacock’s marital room and shovels the reader into the rambling grievances of his, by now, regretful wedded life. From here, a constant pining about his wife, and his son will plague the narrative with the small domestic details that interfere with his lofty ideals of artistry and flattery of his life in the open.
Handkerchief in head, his wife slaves herself ( “proving that she had been slaving herself since dawn") with no decent woman that may help her in the house, begging for money for staples, pesupposing, from Mr Peacock’s perspective, an unpleasant presence that shades his operatic artistry. He regrets the pettiness of this bondage. In the meantime, he splashes in champagne, attends parties and feeds his ego with the praises of his students.
We, readers, are not definitely endorsing this biased view of himself and his own world. The heterodiegetic narrator is in charge of leading us into the flaws of his character by means of irony. Mr Reginald is the pink body man who sings Lohengrin’s opera but deviates from the grandeur of it: there is no Elsa for him. His “thrill of satisfaction” as he contemplates himself in the mirror, silver thread in tie becomes soon dismantled a few lines below by the evocative comic cartoon of John Bull.
Equally, Peacock’s enactments as a singing teacher are questionable as he preys on the frailty of his students for his own wolfish interests of insufflating his vanity. Mrs Brittle’s (brittle: fragile) name is indicative of the frailty to which these women are subjective .
Mr Peacock's own emasculated ego that rides astride between masculinity crisis and marital crisis. His emotional impotency finds its acme when he returns from his aristocratic dalliances, sits on the bed, and thinks of becoming friends with his wife, only to repeat as a tragic chorus how charmed he is with the fodder the outside world bestows on him. The narrator’s use of the word “fiendish”: “for some fiendish reason” articulates his inability to go beyond his own aggrandized self.
A day indeed that repeats itself eternally in his life, as the imbued permanence of the title indicates: it is not a day, but it is “Mr Reginald Peacock’s day.”.His day opens up in the marital room and closes in the marital room with no life changes enacted but a tragicomic performance of a man reliant on what Virginia Woolf termed the magnifying mirror of male vanity, which only diminishes him further by obscuring his true flaws.
By exposing this man, Katherine Mansfield might have uncovered the patriarchal structures to which women were subjected in their private spheres, yet, the unnamed wife is somehow forceful as she pays no heed of Peacock’sdellusions and unmasks, by constantly interrupting his “apparently” seamless fantasy of vanity, the trompe l'oeil of his own life
Notes:
Trompe l’oeil: an optical illusion or a visual trick that makes you think you see something real when it is not.
