Katherine Mansfield’s project in her short story ‘Life of Ma Parker’ is a rejection of the realist insistence on character construction through mere material and social metonymy. She achieves this by distinguishing, and juxtaposing, the titular protagonist’s internal and external worlds, a concept borrowed from the philosophy of Henry Bergson. For Bergson, to confuse the mechanised time of a clock with our internal experience of time is to confuse our ‘habitual’ self (made up of our belongings and sociality) with our conscious self. Internal (conscious) experience is indeed temporal, but not in a linear, quantitative way whereby events can be spatially juxtaposed as in a clockface or timeline. Instead, consciousness flows in an unpredictable, acausal way, which Bergson calls duration. Mansfield employs techniques of focalisation and free indirect style to explore the interdependence and tensions between the ‘authentic’ inner self, and the ‘habitual’ external self.
The story opens in Ma’s perspective, where it will remain for the majority of the story, interrupted by brief incursions into the perspective of a secondary character, ‘her gentleman’. With the exception of the opening paragraph, the story is entirely internally focalised. Ma’s ‘literary gentleman’ is in fact mentioned before Ma herself, foreshadowing the dominant role he is to play in her external life. It is reported indirectly that he ‘asked after her grandson’, whereas Ma’s reply is quoted explicitly in her voice with the dialectal ‘im, simultaneously indicating a social distance between the characters (which is immediately in tension with the proximity suggested by the possessive ‘her gentleman’) and affecting a closeness of Ma and the reader.
The perspective shifts rapidly following direct speech from the gentleman, becoming internally focalised on him; in free indirect style we get information that ‘he was in the middle of his breakfast’ and that ‘he felt awkward’ about the news of the death of Ma’s grandson as well as the speech-like patterns of ‘something—something more’ and ‘Poor old bird!’. The failure of the gentleman to interact or even empathise with her adds to the tension of their social proximity, and indicates a fundamental disconnection between them. While Ma excuses his childish messiness with pity that he has ‘no one to look after him’, he refers to her as a ‘hag’ to his friends and is consistently rude and inconsiderate to her in conversations. This dynamic can be seen as a symptom of two coupled things: their differing social class, and the differing nature of each of their selves. While the realist writer can account for the first reason, they are at a loss to explain the power of the second.
Returning to Ma’s perspective, the focalisation remains internal; her bag is referred to as a ‘fish bag’, not dignified enough to be a bag in its own right; her jacket is ‘worn’ and even her body is broken and requires soothing. But these external descriptions are not from the perspective of an omniscient narrator; the internal focalisation of these passages makes it clear that the miserable descriptions of Ma are in fact reflections of her internal psychology. Similarly, the descriptions of the literary gentleman as having a ‘very shabby dressing-gown’ and a ‘crumpled newspaper’ are framed by his own internal focalisation, indicating his awkwardness about the intrusion of Ma’s internal pain in his external world.
Ma’s reflection that ‘she’s had a hard life’ is returned to throughout the story with intensifying importance, culminating in the attempted flight of her internal self from the controlling pressures of the external world. Although first introduced tacitly by Ma’s descriptions of her clothes, bodily pains and movements (she ‘hobbles’), the theme is strengthened by explicit recollection in a free flow of Ma’s memory. The illusion of external time is shattered, and the disjointed, illogical duration of internal experience plays out. Ellipsis often marks the transition between memories, and between a memory and Ma’s external world, connected by free association. The bed which she makes is associated with the bed Lennie died in; the boots she takes off her own feet with the ‘button boots’ of Lennie’s. These external triggers for memories in Ma’s internal duration show an interpenetrating relationship between the inner psychological world and the external material world; not only are past memories interwoven in duration, but present external perception is too.
There is a tension between Ma’s internal ‘core’ self and her external, social shadow-self; each is constantly threatening to subsume the other. In one sense, her social self and the external world it is constructed alongside seem like direct causes for the pain her core self experiences in her internal duration. In another sense, Ma cannot escape her internal self, as it is her true, ‘authentic’ self.
After another intrusion by the literary gentleman, in which he all but accuses Ma of throwing away his things, she re-enters a free flow of memory fusing in duration with present experience. But her memories are of an internal self which is shaped by the hard concrete limitations of its corresponding external world. In Ma’s case, these limitations are debilitating. There’s a sad irony that her free, soaring internal experience is physically constrained within a body of external habit, an irony tacitly acknowledged by the text when Ma’s internal self attempts to wrest control of her body from the habitual self. Her internal thoughts become speech (‘“What have I done?”’), she throws down her tools—symbols of her socialised, class-restricted self—and physically leaves the dominion of one who exerts control over her. At this moment, she is in a state of ‘dream’, the non-linear, unmechanised duration taking precedence over the quantitative clock-time of her robot self.
But the external world is no place for the true internal self to express itself. Nature is hostile: ‘It was cold in the street. There was wind like ice’; people are hostile: ‘men walked like scissors; the women trod like cats’; even Ma’s external self is hostile: ‘Where could she go? [...] She couldn’t go home [...] She couldn’t sit on a bench anywhere [...] She couldn’t possibly go back to the gentleman’s flat’.
The end of the story is left ambiguous. Ma stands in the street in despair, her internal self apparently defeated by her external self and its world. But the ‘wind [that] blew out her apron into a balloon’ and the rain which begins to pour suggest metaphors for an explosive burst of crying and the flow of tears, indicating yet another breakthrough of her authentic, internal self into her cold external world.