which is juxtaposed with his portrayal as an archetypical, upper class gentleman. In ‘The Pursuit of Substance’, the image of the Victorian aristocrats overcome by “…a scent of frivolity and hedonism” further undermines the characteristic dignity of the upper class, suggesting not only a level of giddiness but also a certain fatuity, as they are thoughtlessly provoked, by this scent, into dancing the cancan. The story is also heavily allusive. As established by T.S. Eliot, the technique of allusion imbues a piece with a sense of tradition, by which Eliot meant historical eternality, a sense of both the past and the fleeting present.This same technique is employed by Katherine Mansfield in ‘Je Ne Parle Pas Français’; in particular, her use of the phrase “dying fall” in parentheses reflects the dra- matic oration by Orsino in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night , in which he laments the fading significance of romantic verse. In ‘The Pursuit of Substance’, “the damnable efflorescence”which sought to uproot probity and virtue is a reference to the publication of Charles Baudelaire’s 1857 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal , a volume of poetry viewed by many as a defining proto-modernist work. Moreover, the protagonist’s name, Sybil, serves as an allusion in itself, referring to Benjamin Disraeli’s politically realist novel of the same name, in which a struggle exists between rich and poor similar to the relationship detailed in ‘The Pursuit of Substance’. Ultimately, this story adopts a Barthesian view of intertextual- ity, seeing it as a means of subverting the author’s dominance by multiplying the range of potential meanings in a text, from one, where the author is God, to a multiplicity of meanings, where the reader is in control. Metonymy and synecdoche are employed in the piece in order to distil broader emotions and sentiments into moments of intense, symbolic significance. In D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Second Best’, “[the] delicious stimulation in [Tom’s] veins” reflects his greater sexual yearning for Frances. Thus in ‘The Pursuit of Substance’, the densely suggestive image of “…a tide of indignation [reducing] Sybil to a clenched fist” establishes Sybil’s and, to a greater
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