Katherine Mansfields Short Stories Essay Research Paper

Katherine Mansfields Short Stories Essay, Research Paper

Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories

The introduction of the short story to literature created a whole new field for writers and readers to experiment with and enjoy. Katherine Mansfield was born and raised in New Zealand and then moved to England where she spent a great deal of her life. Mansfield is known as one of the most remarkable writers to come out of New Zealand and England. Katherine Mansfield’s “specialization” is the short story. Mansfield wrote many short stories in her lifetime and is recognized as having several masterpieces in that form. Her short stories are quite different than most short stories written by the Modernist writers of her time. Mansfield liked for her readers to become immediately involved in her stories and usually drops the reader into the situation at the start of the story with no description or identification of the time or place in which the stories occur. She assumes that her readers had prior knowledge of the characters or that they will determine any information that they need to know on their own. On top of the reader being left floundering, Mansfield’s stories have no plot. That is to say that her stories do not follow the classic form of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and then the denouement. Instead, Mansfield’s intention is for her reader’s to gain a sense of her characters’ lives and of a pivotal point of realization or change in those lives. One of the ways that she accomplishes the reader’s intimacy with the story and its characters, beyond dropping them in the midst of the action, is by using unique narration techniques and by involving the reader in the character’s feelings that they experience when dealing with certain situations or emotions like the experience of dealing with death and grief as found in “The Daughters of the Late Colonel”, “The Garden-Party”, “The Life of Ma Parker”, and “The Fly”.

Katherine Mansfield’s readers find that, although they are unexpectedly beginning her stories in the middle of all the action, they are quickly involved with the characters and their lives and feelings. This immediate establishment of intimacy is facilitated by Mansfield’s superb narration techniques. One could argue that Mansfield even goes so far as to obliterate the narrator, to make the narrator obsolete. Some of her stories, like “Bliss”, begin with the typical third person narrator as in “Although Bertha Young was thirty ” (Mansfield 143). However, the reader quickly finds that such impersonal narration does not last for long and the narration moves to something closer to first person or, at the very least, third person omniscient with such lines as “For the first time in her life Bertha Young desired her husband” (Mansfield 154). Mansfield, as the narrator, has the remarkable ability to enter the minds and souls of her characters. She shows an incredible empathy that allows the reader to get to know the characters through their own thoughts and feelings as they express them to the reader and not as she states them in a distant third person. The reader will quickly identify with the character’s “humanness” and feel a connection to them as in “The Voyage” when little Fenella “might have got the giggles” when she is thrust on an unknown journey with her grandmother after the death of her mother (Mansfield 278). Another narration technique that often appears in Mansfield’s works is that the narration goes from one character’s mind to another so quickly that the reader does not experience a noticeable change. This technique has a stream of consciousness effect and allows the reader to live the story through a multi-personal viewpoint as the narrator is hidden in one character and then another. The prime example of this jumping of narration from one character to another is found in “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” where it is quite difficult to say exactly who is narrating the story as the sister’s minds are so fused in thought that all sentiments seem to come from both of them. This oblique narration may seem confusing to think of, but the narrator simply makes the plot secondary to the characters and the mood of the story. The characters seem so real to the reader that it is as if they are acting on their own accord and the changes in narration from the view of one character to another occurs naturally. Mansfield’s narration is unique in yet another way. The readers of her stories do not have a sense of omniscience since the narrator seems interwoven with the story and not as a distinct voice that speaks to the reader from above the action. Of course, the narrator is omniscient, but the reader, seemingly, gains most of his information directly from the character in the form of their expression of their thoughts. Often, Mansfield utilizes interior monologues in order to narrate the character’s intimate feelings to the reader. A good example of the interior monologue is found in “The Stranger” when John Hammond meets his wife after she has been away for a time and thinks to himself while she has run off to say good-bye to someone, “That was rather queer of Janey, wasn’t it. Why couldn’t she have told the stewardess to say good-bye for her. Why did she have to go chasing after the ship’s doctor.” (Mansfield 230). By allowing the reader to become intimate with John Hammond’s personal thoughts, the narrator gives the reader a “slice of life” t