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FROM DEATH PSYCHOLOGY TO DEEP ECOLOGY AND EASE: KATHERINE MANSFIELD’S FINAL DAYS IN
Authors: Şebnem KAYA
Number of views: 426
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.