In Katherine Mansfield’s “The Wind Blows” Matilda wants urgently to flee her mother’s superficial, stifling world of appearances. So acute is Mansfield’s understanding of her adolescent protagonist’s need to have her inner world recognized, and so skillful is she in portraying this desire, I felt I was reading a story set in the present day, or in any day for that matter.
An autumn wind disturbs Matilda’s sleep, pulls her into a tumultuous day, and the story begins.
After getting dressed, Matilda, on route to her music lesson, tries to leave the house without having her appearance assessed by her mother, but her mother sees her: “Matilda. Matilda. Come back in im-me-diately! What on earth do you have on your head? It looks like a tea-cosy. And why have you got that mane of hair on your forehead?” (107).
A moment later, Matilda tells her mother to “go to hell” (107) and “run[s] down the road” (107). Matilda’s defiance could not be more intense, decisive, or directly portrayed.
At her music lesson, Matilda grows warmly fond of her music teacher, Mr. Bullen, a man honoring music and soul rather than appearances. Mansfield tells us that “[Matilda’s] fingers tremble so that she can’t undo the knot in the music satchel” (108). She blames the autumn wind for her unsteady hands, or, in other words, for her excitement in his comforting presence.
Later, in her bedroom, confronted with the stockings “knotted up on the quilt like a coil of snakes” (109) that her mother wants her to darn, Matilda refuses and then wonders if anyone has ever written poems “to the wind” (109), suggesting that she, unlike her mother, who is annoyed by the wind, is thrilled by its wildness; because poems emerge from one’s core, her desire to write a poem gives us the strong sense, again, that she prefers the inner world to an outer world of socks and bedrooms and hats and chores.
A minute later, she takes up an invitation from her brother, Bogey, to visit the sea; once they are outside, she says to him “ ‘This is better, isn’t it?’”(109). Down at the sea, with drops of sea water in her mouth, her hat off and “her hair blow[ing] across her mouth”(110), she spots a steamer in the harbor, and enters a reverie in which she is on the ship, departing the island forever. In these few lines, Mansfield demonstrates exquisite sympathy for the young girl’s chronic vulnerability- her need for a rich, alternate world empty of silly expectations and preoccupations is so intense, she slips into dreams.
Matilda wakes, though, and discovers “the wind—the wind” (110). She is not on the steamer; rather, she stands on the esplanade with Bogey. Ending her story with Matilda’s recognition of the wind, Mansfield gives us the sense that just as the wind never ceases, neither, perhaps, will Matilda in her need to find a place where her inner world will be recognized, where she will be recognized. The wind, throughout the story, can almost be viewed as a second Matilda; that is, Matilda and the wind have so much in common, particularly restlessness and ferocity.
Mansfield’s characterizations are detailed and nuanced:
“Shall I begin with scales,” she asks, squeezing her hands together. “I had some arpeggios, too.’
But he does not answer. She doesn’t believe he even hears…and then suddenly his fresh hand with the ring on it reaches over and opens Beethoven.
“Let’s have a little of the old master,” he says. (108)
In this short sequence, Mansfield portrays Matilda’s fragility, her sensitivity to Mr. Bullen’s physical presence, and Mr. Bullen’s paternal ease with her.
Also, Mansfield does a wonderful job of showing us Matilda’s feelings: “Mr. Bullen takes her hands. His shoulder is there—just by her head. She leans on it ever so little, her cheek against the springy tweed” (108). In a few strokes of her pen, Mansfield draws Matilda’s longing to be comforted by the closest person she can find to a friend, and this longing veering into desperate, poignant action.
When I finished “The Wind Blows”, I wondered how Mansfield could have known, when she wrote this story, what I was like when I was young. She died so many decades before I was born; in fact, she died decades before my mother was born. Certain experiences must be universal to the adolescent girl: confinement of one sort or another, reverie and longing for a world in which she is understood and where she is not stifled.
Considering all of the stories Mansfield wrote in her short life, I wonder if it was her ability, along with her eye for physical detail and her musical writing, to penetrate the heart of any character without closing her eyes to what she saw and felt there, that explains why she is read today, and why I felt, at such a distance of time and geography, that I was reading a story about me.
Mansfield, Katherine. “The Wind Blows.” The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield. London: Penguin Group, 1981. 106-110.
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