From the doll’s house to the little dark room: the experience of the feminine in four short stories by Katherine Mansfield

Abstract

In this monographic work, we have analysed four feminine characters from Katherine Mansfield’s modernist short stories, The Doll’s House, Her First Ball, Bliss, and Miss Brill, all written between 1918 and 1922, focusing on a parallel between how their characters experienced womanhood and the experiences of real women in early 20th century. Our preeminent purpose was to determine if we could attain an accurate portrayal of the feminine experience through Mansfield’s work, despite Lukács’s belief that modernist literature could not depict reality in an authentic manner because it was too subjective and fragmented, removing the individual from their historical context. Therefore, we have aimed to demonstrate, through the comparison between the feminine experience of Mansfield’s women characters and historical data from the timeframe they were written, that modernist fiction is still capable of being a mirror of its time. To do so, in addition to the analysis of the characters Mrs. Kelvey, Leila, Bertha Young, and Miss Brill, and the collection of historical data from the livelihood of women in the late 19th century and early 20th century, we have also searched to go in-depth on Mansfield’s preferred genre, the short story, and the modernist movement itself. The authors we employed in our theoretical basis have been Bates (1972), who disserted about the modern short story and, finally, Lukács (1963), Becker (1963), and Howe (1967), whose views on Realism and Modernism have helped us understand these literary movements more thoroughly. In the course of our work, we have reached the conclusion that, in spite of Lukács’s belief that modernist literature was unable to form a coherent portrait of reality, Katherine Mansfield was still capable of using modernism as a mirror of its time.