Mr Reginald Peacock's Day by Katherine Mansfield (2)

 THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING CALLED MR REGINALD PEACOCK

by Belén Tizón

Source for photo here

Katherine Mansfield does not select her main character's name carelessly: Mr. Reginald Peacock, a full name that distills social climbing, sovereignty, and bravado. In her intention to highlight the clash between public and private identity and to give the story a comic yet tragic tone, Mansfield introduces the character; she even gives him the story's title, as a man of status.

Firstly, she honours him with the respectful title of Mr; therefore, the reader may create an image of a man of high achievement and social relevance. Furthermore, she opts for a name, Reginald, whose origin is Germanic, linked to royalty and leadership; again, she plays with satire to mock his thirst for control and power. It is someone who offers wise counsel; our Reginald in this story is a smarty man, imbued in airs of grandeur, and admired with an artistic gaze by many people, especially women. It is not an issue for him to advise his pupils, but not voidless; his flatteries and feedback are not at all constructive but lapidating, mockery, just to perpetuate his ego to continue growing, despite his remarks considering himself an anti-vain man (“Not that he was vain- he couldn't stand vain men-no).

The fact of choosing as the final name the most ridiculed name is not casual; we can perceive a gradation in his names, from the most respectful ones to the most absurd: peacocks are a symbol of superficiality, strut, and vanity. Vanity is associated with another symbol, mirrors, present in the story in a very significant part when teaching Betty Brittle, and placing her in front of the mirror, so he can see his powerful self-reflection ("Do you ever practise before a glass?" asked Reginald. "You ought to, you know... Come over here." They went over to the mirror and stood side by side “).

This social admiration, and his self-determination contrasts strongly with his cruelty, resentment adressing his wife and son (the very first lines of the short-story are a clear example of his dominant masculine attitudes), evidencing Mainsfield's dual aim: tragedy and comedy, private and public identity.

The final scene of the story could be interpreted as the moral of the story: he comes back home after spending a night keeping company with high-class people, drinking champagne, surrounded by an artificial reality, however, he sits on the side of the bed, and regarding his wife, he seems to be enlightened by a spell of reality ( “If only I felt that she was ere to come back to-that I could confide in her..”), but his blindness due to vanity does not allow him to land and walk along real life. (“ But of all those splendid things he had to say, not one could he utter. [...]the only words he could get out were: “Dear lady, I should be so charmed-so charmed”

Mr Reginald Peacock's Day by Katherine Mansfield (1)

 The” art” of loving oneself

Source for image: here

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 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 

Reviewed by Ana M Sánchez 

Notes:

Trompe l’oeil: an optical illusion or a visual trick that makes you think you see something real when it is not.

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Collaborative Work: An Angel at my Table by Janet Frame

 

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Volume I: Janet Frame’s Autobiographies

 

"To the Is-Land”

The Hyphenated

 Space

When Janet Frame is asked to write a review of “A Fable “ and other William Faulkner’s novels from the library. She thinks 

“ spinning, spinning, awhirl in pools of words and feeling… How could I write a review of a novelist who clouded my vision with feeling? I returned to the book, reading it again and again, slowly emerging into the clear-fountain light where the characters, the scenes, the meaning appeared starkly outlined, solid, real, good. This was William Faulkner’s world, and I had found it to keep it” (page 309 / Volume 2: An Angel at my Table)

Janet Frame’s words about William Faulkner could as well express the feelings one has when approaching Frame’s biographies: “clouding one’s vision with feeling.” This is all about feeling, poetry, reading about vulnerability, pain and beauty. Jane Campion admits “she has disarmed me” / “struck a blow right to my heart.” I run attuned with these thoughts. She has given a voice to us, the teenage girls and children we were (Jane Campion).

To the Is-land

New Zealand, an island, Janet’s island, a country full of rivers. The book opens with a parade of the many family arterial connections through different lands: Flemish Weavers, descendants of William of Orange, a tinge of Scottish blood, and even African and Maori ascendency...people like places running like rivers through firm land. The narrative spins up through place, physical and metaphorical.

Frame is an island inhabiting the hyphenated vacuum of the is-land, her choice of word ushers us into the first volume of her autobiography. What does Is-land mean? How does the word unthread in this hyphenated separation of a verb and a noun?

Island / Is-land: Janet hoisted in isolation, a piece of land adrift in the immensity of the ocean, a land that resists conquering, and a land to be claimed as the territory of the self. Her body, her land is subjected to plunder: everybody wants to change her, straighten her hair; she must use a girdle so her behind will not be seen; she should not use red lipstick as it does not match her hair. The coarse tunic girdling her body, tightening her, restraining her …

As James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, she forges her way into conquering her ground, her land, the territory of the self, of her imagination. This is a journey of self-discovery as a writer and conquering the land of words, a journey that takes place outside and inside. She describes herself as a commonplace, practical woman.

That year I discovered the word Island, which in spite of all teaching I insisted on calling Is-Land. In our silent reading class at school, when we chose one of the Whitcombes school readers, those thin, fawn-covered books with crude drawings on the cover and speckled pages, I found a story, To the Island, an adventure story that impressed me so much that I talked about it at home. ‘I read a story, To the Is-Land, about some children going to an Is-Land. //’ ‘It’s I-Land,’ Myrtle corrected. //‘It’s not,’ I said. ‘It’s Is-Land. It says,’ I spelled the letters, ‘I-s-l-an-d. Is-land.’ // ‘It’s a silent letter,’ Myrtle said. ‘Like knee.’ // In the end, reluctantly, I had to accept the ruling, although within myself I still thought of it as the Is-Land. (Page 35)

Her parents’ artistry—and their world overflowing with books, music, and painting—shapes her early imagination and forges the passion that would lead her to become a writer. Words captivate her: their meanings, their deceptions, their force. She ploughs her way into poetry.

The process of growing takes place through physical pains, poverty, dereliction, death and through many convulsive historical moments: The Great Depression, the Second World War, the lack of Social Security ( the first Labour Government in New Zealand that guaranteed access to Social Security was elected in 1935). At home, there is the struggle with disease (Brudie’s epileptic fits), death (Myrtle), economic penury and hardship. At Willowglen, the kitchen floor is made of earth. 

In the real world, as she calls it, she shifts through the different pronouns, the family “we”, the students “we,” the institutional “she" of the asylum. She fumbles in search of her "I,” which she finally finds in writing. Upon discovery of the Grimm Brothers’ Tales, she discovers a world where fiction and reality cohabit and blend as she interiorizes and fleshes the stories under the veil of magical impersonations. 

Later, she is marked by the impossible- to - utter - grieving caused by the death of her sister Myrtle. It is only the poets, she broods, following her mother, who can voice the lashing pain of this bereavement.  "Annabel Lee, in a Kingdom by the Sea"  by Edgar Allan Poem serves Janet to articulate the pain of Myrtle's absence:

Eden Street, in Oamaru, New Zealand, the world, in the outbreak of the Second World War… (See: "A Portrait of the Artist" by James Joyce with a similar categorization) She becomes her heroines and her heroes, and as Madame Bovary (Bovarism), she outpours and feeds from the imaginative worlds she reads: 

Gradually I was acquiring an image of myself as a person apartfrom myself as a poet, and in my reading I identified most easilywith the stoical solitary heroine suffering in silence, the ‘plain Jane’content to love the strong, inarticulate hero, who was easily beguiled by the flashily beautiful woman but who turned always in the end (regretfully too late) to the shadowy shy woman he had failed to notice. I saw myself as a ‘background’ person watching, listening. I was not Becky Sharp; I was Emma. Yet I was also Tess and Marty South, as I had once been Anne of Green Gables and Charlotte Brontë (Isabel being Emily, and June Ann). I was Maggie Tulliver and Jane Eyre and Cathy. And when I could find no heroine to become, I was myself simply adoring the heroes – Jude the Obscure, Raskolnikov, Brutus, rather than Mark Antony, whom everyone liked.

And Shakespeare.