Reading Test 18
Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield was a modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in New Zealand.
Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp Murry was born in 1888, into a prominent family in Wellington, New Zealand. She became one of New Zealand’s best-known writers, using the pen name Katherine Mansfield. The daughter of a banker and born into a middle-class family, she was also a first cousin of Countess Elizabeth von Arnim, a distinguished novelist in her time. Mansfield had two older sisters and a younger brother. Her father, Harold Beauchamp, went on to become the chairman of the Bank of New Zealand.
In 1893, the Mansfield family moved to Karori, a suburb of Wellington, where Mansfield would spend the happiest years of her childhood; she later used her memories of this time as an inspiration for The Prelude story.
Her first published stories appeared in the High School Reporter and the Wellington Girls’ High School magazine in 1898 and 1899. In 1902, she developed strong feelings for a musician who played the cello, Arnold Trowell, although her feelings were not, for the most part, returned. Mansfield herself was an accomplished cellist, having received lessons from Trowell’s father. Mansfield wrote in her journals of feeling isolated to some extent in New Zealand, and, in general terms, of her interest in the Māori people (New Zealand’s native people), who were often portrayed in a sympathetic light in her later stories, such as How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped.
She moved to London in 1903, where she attended Queen’s College, along with her two sisters. Mansfield recommended playing the cello, an occupation that she believed, during her time at Queen’s, she would take up professionally. She also began contributing to the college newspaper, with such dedication to it that she eventually became its editor. She was particularly interested in the works of the French writers of this period and of the 19th-century British writer, Oscar Wilde, and she was appreciated amongst fellow students at Queen’s for her lively and charismatic approach to life and work.
She met fellow writer Ida Baker, a South African, at the college, and the pair became lifelong friends. Mansfield did not actively support the suffragette movement in the UK. Women in New Zealand had gained the right to vote in 1893.
Mansfield first began journeying into other parts of Europe in the period 1903–1906, mainly to Belgium and Germany. After finishing her schooling in England, she returned to her New Zealand home in 1906, only then beginning to write short stories in a serious way. She had several works published in an Australian magazine called Native Companion, which was her first paid writing work, and by this time she had her mind set on becoming a professional writer. It was also the first occasion on which she used the pseudonym “K. Mansfield”.
Mansfield rapidly grew discontented with the provincial New Zealand lifestyle, and with her family. Two years later she was back again in London. Her father sent her an annual subsidy of £100 for the rest of her life. In later years, she would express both admiration and disdain for New Zealand in her journals.
In 1911, Mansfield met John Middleton Murry, the Oxford scholar and editor of the literary magazine Rhythm. They were later to marry in 1918. Mansfield became a co-editor of Rhythm, which was subsequently called The Blue Review, in which more of her works were published. She and Murry lived in various houses in England and briefly in Paris. The Blue Review failed to gain enough readers and was soon liquidated. Their attempt to set up as writers in Paris was cut short by Murry’s bankruptcy, which resulted from the failure of this and other journals. Life back in England meant frequently changed addresses and very limited funds.
Between 1915 and 1918, Mansfield moved between England and Bandol, France. She and Murry developed close contact with other well-known writers of the time such as D. H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell and Aldous Huxley. By October 1918 Mansfield had become seriously ill; she had been diagnosed with tuberculosis and was advised to enter a sanatorium. She could no longer spend time with writers in London. In the autumn of 1918 she was so ill that she decided to go to Ospedale in Italy.
It was the publication of Bliss and Other Stories in 1920 that was to solidify Mansfield’s reputation as a writer. Mansfield also spent time in Menton, France, as the tenant of her father’s cousin at “The Villa Isola Bella”. There she wrote what she pronounced to be “…the only story that satisfies me to any extent”.
Mansfield produced a great deal of work in the final years of her life, and much of her prose and poetry remained unpublished at her death in 1923. After her death, her husband, Murry, took on the task of editing and publishing her works. His efforts resulted in two additional volumes of short stories: The Dove’s Nest and Something Childish, published in 1923 and 1924 respectively, the publication of her Poems as well as a collection of critical writings (Novels and Novelists) and a number of editions of Mansfield’s previously unpublished letters and journals.
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The Ecological Importance of Bees
A
Sometime in the early Cretaceous period of the Earth’s history, hunting wasps of a certain type became bees by adopting a vegetarian diet: they began to rely more and more on the pollen of plants as a source of protein for themselves and their offspring, as an alternative to insects. In so doing, they accidentally transported pollen on their bodies to other plants of the same species, bringing about pollination. The stage was thus set for a succession of ever-closer mutual adaptations of bees and flowering plants. In particular, flowers began to reward bees for their unwitting role in their reproduction by providing richer sources of pollen and another source of nutrition, nectar.
B
Today about 15 percent of our diet consists of crops which are pollinated by bees. The meat and other animal products we consume are ultimately derived from bee-pollinated forage crops, and account for another 15 percent. It follows that around one third of our food is directly or indirectly dependent on the pollinating services of bees. On a global basis, the annual value of agricultural crops dependent on the pollination services of bees is estimated at £1,000 million (US$1,590 million). Much of this pollination is due to honey bees, and in monetary terms it exceeds the value of the annual honey crop by a factor of fifty.
C
But the apparently harmonious relationship between bees and plants conceals a conflict of interests. Although flowers need bees and vice versa, it pays each partner to minimise its costs and maximise its profits. This may sound like an extreme case of attributing human qualities to non-human species, but using the marketplace and the principles of double-entry book-keeping as metaphors may give us some insights into what is really going on between bees and flowering plants. In the real world, both flower and bee operate in a competitive marketplace. A community of retailers (the flowers) seeks to attract more or less discriminating consumers (the bees). Each flower has to judge the costs and benefits of investing in advertising, by colour and scent, and providing rewards, nectar and pollen; clearly a species which depends on cross-pollination is on a knife-edge: it must provide sufficient nectar to attract the interest of a bee, but not enough to satisfy all of its needs in one visit. A satiated bee would return to its nest rather than visit another flower. The bee, on the other hand, is out to get the maximum amount of pollen and nectar. It must assess the quality and quantity of rewards which are on offer and juggle its energy costs so that it makes a comfortable profit on each foraging trip. The apparent harmony between plants and bees is therefore not all that it seems. Instead, it is an equilibrium based on compromises between the competing interests of the protagonists.
D
This sounds remarkably like the ideas of the 18th-century economist Adam Smith. In his book, The Wealth of Nations, Smith postulated that in human society the competitive interactions of different “economic units” eventually resulted in a balanced, or “harmonious” society. One might predict, therefore, that economists would find the relationships between bees and plants of some interest. This is the case in Israel, where economists are collaborating with botanists and entomologists in a long-term study of the pollination biology of the native flora, in an attempt to understand the dynamics of the relationship between communities of bees and plants.
E
This sort of study is of more than passing academic interest. It is important that authorities understand the various relationships between plants and their pollinators. This is especially true when, say, devising conservation policies. A good example comes from the forests of tropical South America. Here, as in all rainforests, there is a high diversity of tree species. There may be more than 120 per acre, but in a given acre there may only be one or two individuals of any one species. These trees are pollinated by large, fast flying bees. There is evidence that certain types of bees learn the distribution of these scattered trees and forage regularly along the same routes. This is called “trap-lining” and the bees forage for up to 23 km from their nests. The bees are therefore acting as long distance pollinators.
F
An issue of current concern in tropical forest conservation is that of trying to estimate the minimum sustainable size of ‘islands’ of forest reserve in areas where large-scale felling is taking place. There is much discussion on seed dispersal distances. But this is only one half of the equation, so far as the reproduction of trees is concerned. There is another question that must be addressed in order to calculate whether proposed forest reserves are close enough to the nearest large tract of forest: what is the flight range of these long-distance foragers? We need to know much more about bees and their relationships with plants before this question can be answered.
G
Bees, then, are vital to our survival. Furthermore, much of the visual impact of human environments derives from vegetation, and most vegetation is dependent on bees for pollination. Thus, as pollinators of crops and natural vegetation, bees occupy key positions in the web of relationships which sustain the living architecture of our planet.
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Pacific navigation and voyaging
How people migrated to the Pacific islands
The many tiny islands of the Pacific Ocean had no human population until ancestors of today’s islanders sailed from Southeast Asia in ocean-going canoes approximately 2,000 years ago. At the present time, the debate continues about exactly how they migrated such vast distances across the ocean, without any of the modern technologies we take for granted.
Although the romantic vision of some early twentieth-century writers of fleets of heroic navigators simultaneously setting sail had come to be considered by later investigators to be exaggerated, no considered assessment of Pacific voyaging was forthcoming until 1956 when the American historian Andrew Sharp published his research. Sharp challenged the ‘heroic vision’ by asserting that the experience of the navigators was limited, and that the settlement of the islands was not systematic, being more dependent on good fortune of drifting canoes. Sharp’s theory was widely challenged and eventually, before long, obsolete. However, it did spark renewed interest in the topic and precipitated new research.
Since the 1960s a wealth of investigations has been conducted, and most of them, thankfully, have been of the non-armchair variety. Much of what has been done to date is still of ‘armchair’ research – that has been an examination of available published materials – it is lamentable that so little progress had been made in the area of Pacific voyaging because most writers relied on the same old sources – travellers’ journals or missionary narratives composed by unskilled observers. After Sharp, this began to change, and researchers conducted most of their investigations not in libraries, but in the field.
In 1965, David Lewis, a physician and experienced yachtsman, set to work using his own unique philosophy: he took the view that if he could learn how many years had navigated through the islands in order to contact those men who still find their way at sea using traditional methods. He then accompanied them on their traditional craft rather than the types of craft with which all modern instruments were banished from his voyage as a return trip of around 1,000 nautical miles between islands in his modern canoe. Far from supporting the doubts expressed by Sharp, Lewis found that ancient navigators probably knew much course to follow by memorizing which stars rose and set from certain positions along the horizon and thus depended far more on star path navigation than on blind drifting.
The geographer Edwin Doran followed a quite different approach. He was interested in obtaining exact data on canoe sailing performance and hence defined and employed the term performance abstraction. Doran surveyed the design of traditional sailing canoes in some of the most remote parts of the Pacific, all the while using his instruments to record canoe speeds in different wind strengths – from gales to calms. He used all the data collected to relate wind to the canoe. In the process, he provided the first really precise attributes of traditional sailing canoes.
A further contribution was made by Steven Horvath. As a physiologist, Horvath’s interest was not in discovering how the people reached the islands but how the people of the islands kept them themselves alive by adopting ingenious physiological techniques. Horvath was able to calculate the energy expenditure required to paddle canoes of that era and at times when there was no wind to fill the sails, or when the directions of the wind were contrary. He concluded that paddles, or perhaps long oars, could indeed have propelled for long distances what were primarily sailing vessels.
Finally, a team led by P. Wall Garrard conducted important research, in this case by making investigations while remaining safely in the laboratory. Wall Garrard’s unusual method was to use the findings of linguists who had studied the languages of the Pacific islands, many of which are remarkably similar although the islands where they are spoken are sometimes thousands of kilometres apart. Clever adaptation of computer simulation techniques pioneered in other disciplines allowed him to produce convincing models suggesting that the migrations were indeed systematic, but not simultaneous. Wall Garrard proposed the migrations should be seen not as a single journey made by a massed fleet of canoes, but as a series of ever more ambitious voyages, each pushing further into the unknown ocean.
What do we learn about Pacific navigation and voyaging from this research? Quite correctly, none of the researchers tried to use their findings to prove one theory or another; experiments such as these cannot categorically confirm or negate a hypothesis. The strength of this research lay in the range of methodologies employed. When we splice together these findings we can propose that traditional navigators used a variety of canoe types, sources of water and navigation techniques, and it was this adaptability which was their greatest accomplishment. These navigators observed the conditions prevailing at sea at the time a voyage was made and altered their techniques accordingly. Furthermore, the canoes of the navigators were not drifting helplessly at sea but were most likely part of a systematic migration; as such, the Pacific peoples were able to view the ocean as an avenue, not a barrier, to communication before any other race on Earth. Finally, one unexpected but most welcome consequence of this research has been a renaissance in the practice of traditional voyaging. In some groups of islands in the Pacific today young people are resurrecting the skills of their ancestors, when a few decades ago it seemed they would be lost forever.
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