Wot For? Rot and Fertility in Katherine Mansfield’s “The Woman at the Store” (1912)

Abstract

How can one mobilise limited agency under patriarchal structures which value female fertility as finitely consumable? In “The Woman at the Store”, Katherine Mansfield renders ambiguous the boundary between rot and fertility in order to catalyse a shift in conceptualisations of female fertility from finite consumption to decomposition. This change allows for a recycling of materials, where change is cyclical rather than finite, and where matter is changed but not reduced. This rot and decomposition then embody a resistance to patriarchal imperatives that imagine the female body and its fertility as in service to others and to the colonial imperatives which imagine the female and non-human elements of the story as contributing to a colonial ‘new world’ in New Zealand. I propose that engagement with rot and decomposition embodies a form of agency that mobilises deviance within the story, where rot becomes an aesthetic that reveals limited agency for the subaltern. In Vibrant Matter (2010), Jane Bennett argues that “bodies enhance their power in or as a heterogeneous assemblage” rather than as individual beings (23). This essay will argue that in the agentic assemblage in “The Woman at the Store”, women appropriate images and ideals of fertility with concurrent images of rot. Moving on to the non-human elements of the assemblage, I explore how the use of unconventional animal metaphors challenges the homogeny of the animal as referent, making them unusable as metaphors aligned with consumption. Lastly, I will argue that plants in the assemblage act both as indicators of geographical fertility and symbols which reveal figurative dualisms and tensions within systems of power as an element of the agentic assemblage. This tracing of the different agentic valences of the assemblage (women, animals, plants) will allow for the identification of their collective assertion of agency in the text.