Sunday Shorts is a series where I blog about short fiction – from flash to novellas. For the time being, I’m sticking to prose, although it’s been suggested I could expand this feature to include single episodes of anthology television series like The Twilight Zone or individual stories/issues of anthology comics (like the 1970s DC horror or war anthology titles). So anything is possible. But for now, the focus is on short stories.
TITLE: At the Bay
AUTHOR: Katherine Mansfield
56 pages, Melville House Publishing, ISBN 9781612195834 (softcover)
DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): Told in thirteen parts, beginning early in the morning and ending at dusk, At the Bay captures both the Burnell family's intricate web of relatives and friends, and the dreamy, unassuming natural beauty of Crescent Bay.
MY RATING: 3 out of 5 stars
MY THOUGHTS: Yet another classic novella that I don’t remember being assigned to read. Mansfield packs a lot of characterization and social commentary into 56 or so pages. The focus is on the women in the Burnell family, both adults and children, and a small cross-section of their neighbors. How they interact, how they empower and disempower each other in everyday moments. There is no grand event the story builds toward, no community-threatening or -destroying big moment that ties everything together. We’re experiencing a day-in-the-life of a very specific group of women and girls at a specific moment in time (1922), but much of what the author relates, in terms of what is deemed appropriate behavior and the like, is still true today. The moments among the children (three girls and their two boy cousins) mirror the moments among the adult women.
Because the story is set on a week-day the men in the family are fairly peripheral, acting on the women mostly from afar rather than in-scene. The men clearly think they are the center of the universe (one, near the story’s end, is highly concerned that his wife’s day was totally ruined because he rushed out to work without saying goodbye.), and are pretty much oblivious (willfully, I think) to the details of how the women spend their day. Interestingly, Mansfield starts and ends the story with the men: the opening scene focuses on two men going for a swim as well as the movements of a local shepherd. The shepherd retraces his route near the end of the story, overlapping with one of the few moments where a man’s effect on one of the Burnell women is direct and in-scene rather than from afar.
Mansfield’s descriptions of the weather and the natural setting are just beautiful. The weather isn’t the focus of the story, so one might be tempted to take these descriptions as window-dressing and choose not to linger over the language. I also found it interesting that she personifies some of the animals (a cat, and the shepherd’s dog, have distinct personalities), and also that the one infant in the story is described the way the animals are – he’s given a bit of personality but remains nameless unlike the older children. Even nameless and speechless, the baby still comes across as as much of a burden/inconvenience to his mother as his father is.
I wasn’t as enamored of the vignette-style telling of the story as I was of what it had to say about culture and the treatment of women (both by men and by other women). It felt more disjointed than cohesive.