Katherine Mansfield Revisited: Constructions of the Self in Christa Moog's Aus tausend grünen Spiegeln
In: Women in German yearbook: feminist studies in German literature & culture, Volume 14, Issue 1, p. 225-243
ISSN: 1940-512X
This essay places Christa Moog's Aus tausend grünen Spiegeln (1988) in the tradition of women's autobiographical writings that resort to multiple displacements of subjectivity. Moog, who bases her novel on her expatriation from the GDR in 1984 and her subsequent travels throughout Europe and New Zealand in the 1980s, retreats behind a first-person narrator who, in turn, disappears behind the life and writings of Katherine Mansfield. A closer look at the narrative strategies, which interlace the lives of Moog's narrator and Mansfield, can reveal that Moog presents freedom from restrictive structures quite ambivalently. In the case of both women, the desire for self-realization and independence results in lives overshadowed by a sense of displacement and the loss of orientation and identity. (HM)