Katherine Mansfield’s "The Escape"

             “The Escape” is one of the short stories in Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss and Other Stories (1920). During the winter of 1919 to 1920, she was in Menton, France without her husband, John Middleton Murry, which made her feel deeply lonely, nervous and irritated, a condition which was worsened by her failing health. She wrote “The Escape” after coming back to England in 1920.

            The husband and wife in the story depict their contrasting emotional approaches. They try to determine who is in control of their marriage. The wife constantly displayed impulsive, negative reactions. The story is more like an interior monologue of the wife.  There is a sense of distance as the characters are unnamed.

The story begins abruptly, "It was his fault, wholly and solely his fault..." The narrator says that the wife puts all the blame on her husband if they miss the train. It shows her dominance over her husband. The wife is already upset about what her husband could have done to be on time at the train. Even though it's unnecessary, the wife makes an apology for her husband's "absurd and ridiculous way" of saying to the driver to hasten the driving.

 The author gives hints that the wife doesn't love children when she sees them at the station. Even though they make an effort to please her with flowers, the wife is annoyed with the children and calls them "poor little mice" and "hungry little monkeys". She manipulatively stops her husband from giving something to those children.

The couple misses their train and has to take a carriage instead. The husband makes a cruel remark on seeing her belongings in her silver bag, ‘In Egypt she would be buried with those things”. The things such as  “her powder puff, her rouge stick, a bundle of letters, a vial of thin black pills like seeds, a broken cigarette, a mirror, white ivory tablets…” show her dependence on medication.

When the couple reaches the bottom of the valley riding in a carriage, she says she heard her parasol fall and leaves him to find it alone. Mansfield represents the wife's femininity as the parasol. The wife uses it to protect her from the heat of the sun but she refuses to use it later from the dusty wind because she's "far, far too exhausted to hold up a parasol" and adds more complaints about the wind. This shows that she has the authority of whether or not to use her womanly rights.

Then, the husband hears the sea sound ‘hish, hish’ and “he feels himself, lying there, a hollow man, a parched, withered man, as it were, of ashes”. This is an image of a dying man.  He notices a beech tree just beyond a garden gate: ‘a round, thick silver stem and big somber copper leaves’. It seems to grow and expand until the big carved leaves hide the sky, which could be a sign of something sinister. Then he hears a woman singing from within its depths or from beyond there. His chest is attacked by ‘something unbearable and dreadful’. He cries in pain and tries to get rid of it in vain.

The story narrates both dream and reality. The couple really gets into another train. It is night and the husband is standing in the shaking corridor which possibly refers to the shaky relationship between the couple. From the open carriage door, he overhears his wife talking to the other passengers about her husband’s unwillingness to travel and her sickness.

Thus the author presents a story about a couple who continues to live together in spite of their frequent quarrels.