ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the affective functions of fictional material things. The first section examines the way Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys connect things with positive affect to rewrite normative ideas attached to feelings such as being at home, being happy, and empathizing. This is a new perspective into stories whose readers often highlight gendered thematics of alienation, objectification, and victimization. The chapter provides a further reading of how these feminist concerns acquire affirmative tones that in fact enhance their critical potential when attention is payed to the materialities with the help of which they are rendered in the stories. The second section focuses on at the ways Djuna Barnes’s and Mansfield’s stories are structured around affective shifts and sequences that in turn are anchored in material things, as well as the ways material things are “incorporated” in their affective structures. The readings show how paying attention to the affectivity of matter and its rendering in the narrative form can shift ideas of the extent and limits of sharing emotion, while further exploring how the boundaries between things and people are challenged in the modernist writers’ work.
