ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Katherine Mansfield's choice of dual communities – particularly of two women artists – as pivotal in her communitarian impulse to participate in, but simultaneously disrupt, the general modernist community of artists. Jessica Berman, in turn, reimagines community in high modernist fiction as directly engaged with early twentieth-century historical and political transformations. Mansfield's controversial relationship with the community of women artists justifies her inclusion in Bonnie Kime Scott's The Gender of Modernism. In Mansfield, this perception of sisterhood proves to be problematic, since psychological motivations frequently reveal a covert enmity that Jacques Derrida appropriately theorises in his Politics of Friendship. Mansfield's relationship with women artists was always controversial and reflects Derrida's parasitic model. Mansfield's understanding of her coetaneous modernist community seems an anticipated response to Pierre Bourdieu's Rules of Art. Mansfield resented this utopian artistic reciprocity, with its childish undertones of paternal control, and felt that these groups were as asphyxiating as any other field of power.
