Introduction

Nietzsche's rendering of fin de siècleangst anticipated Heidegger's famous dictum that ‘Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world’, which aptly captures the modernist malaise – a malaise that characterises so much of Katherine Mansfield's writing. As a restless wanderer and permanently uprooted cosmopolitan she would most likely have agreed with Nietzsche on the instability of ‘realities’; yet she seemed to yearn for more durable ones. In her penultimate letter to her husband a few weeks before her death, she exclaimed, ‘[I]f I were allowed one single cry to God that cry would be I want to be REAL? Robert Louis Stevenson, a contemporary of Nietzsche, whose writing is now commonly classified as ‘proto-modernist’, was similarly aware of discontinuity and rupture. In his essay ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, Stevenson declares: ‘The obscurest epoch is today; and that for a thousand reasons of inchoate tendency, conflicting report, and sheer mass and multiplicity of experience; but chiefly, perhaps, by reason of an insidious shifting of landmarks.’ ‘Shifting landmarks’ is a catchword for both Stevenson and Mansfield's experiences. This essay does not propose a psycho-biographical reading of their work. Rather, it will examine related questions of home and belonging as well as of displacement and alienation, studying how characters in selected short stories position themselves in and against the physical and cultural geography of the South Pacific.