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In a letter to Vita Sackville-West dated 8 August 1931, eight years after Katherine Mansfield’s death, Virginia Woolf confides that she “gave up” reading her literary rival’s stories “because of their cheap sharp sentimentality”. Woolf’s observation invites us to question: is Mansfield a mere sentimentalist or is her characterisation technique misunderstood? The first section of this paper demonstrates that attributing Mansfield’ works as “sentimental” is erroneous since Mansfield’s strategy is to change the masks of her characters within her stories, revealed in her letters and journal entries. Following the first section of this paper, I aim to explore how Mansfield extends this strategy of changing masks in daily life to her fictional characters in “Je ne parle pas français” (1918) by equipping them with different types of masks—speech and facial expressions, gender, and animality—to respond to changes in their situations and toward the characters around them. Particularly important to this exploration are Joan Rivière’s insights into gender in her article, “Womanliness as Masquerade”, Michael Goldman’s theory of masks in acting in his The Actor’s Freedom: Toward a Theory of Drama and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of “becoming-animal” in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature.

Katherine Mansfield’s Art of Changing Masks in “Je ne parle pas français”