FROM DEATH PSYCHOLOGY TO DEEP ECOLOGY AND EASE: KATHERINE MANSFIELD’S FINAL DAYS IN FRANCE

In 1922, at a time when death was closing on her, Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) could forget the solemnity of her state by adopting a holistic approach to the world, which, in 1973, Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss (1912-2009) would theorise about and term “deep ecology.” At the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau-Avon, on the threshold of her permanent end, deep in her psyche Mansfield found happiness in the feeling of kinship with and compassion for life forms other than her own. There she also saw the physical representation of the philosophy of deep ecology in Russian mystic George Ivanovich Gurdjieff’s (1866?-1949) “Movements,” a symbolic dance deemed sacred and traceable to Sufism which, with its stress on the unity within the universe, had centuries ago foreshadowed deep ecology. Furthermore, at Fontainebleau, where the paths of people of different nationalities and creeds intersected, Mansfield felt affiliated with humans, thereby calling Gurdjieff’s disciples “my people,” and contemplated in unison with them man’s symbiotic relation to the universe. This paper, focused on the last stage of Mansfield’s life which she spent in France with references to her letters and other relevant writings, proposes to discuss that in the said period and setting, the writer acquired a sense of oneness with both human and nonhuman nature, or nature in its totality, which ultimately, like alchemy, transformed the painful period she had to endure into a rewarding one.