Mansfield’s story ‘‘The Doll’s House’’ is a work that relies on the careful balance of its elements in order to make its unstated points felt. Elements are juxtaposed against each other to highlight their similarities and differences. Mansfield does this tactfully and subtly, so that even a careful reader might not see it until the…
Tag: Katherine Mansfield
The Doll’s House by Katherine Mansfield – Setting
New Zealand History This story takes place in Karori, which is on the outskirts of Wellington, the capital of New Zealand. At the time the action takes place, New Zealand was in its postcolonial phase. The country colonized relatively late. The first Europeans to arrive were the Dutch, in 1642, but the country remained open…
The Doll’s House by Katherine Mansfield – Literary Devices – Symbolism
Omniscient Narrator ‘‘The Doll’s House’’ is told from a third-person point of view. The narrator is not a character within the story, one who would speak of herself or himself as ‘‘I’’ or ‘‘me,’’ but is instead an outside observer, reporting on all of the characters as ‘‘he’’ or ‘‘she.’’ Frequently, third-person narrators will limit…
The Doll’s House by Katherine Mansfield – Themes
Class Conflict The town that is depicted in ‘‘The Doll’s House’’ is clearly one with a range of different social classes, as Mansfield explains in the fourteenth paragraph. This explains why people of different classes are attending the same school. For examples of the different economic levels represented here, she mentions judges and doctors, storekeepers…
The Doll’s House by Katherine Mansfield – Characters
Aunt Beryl Aunt Beryl is a self-centered woman who imagines herself to be sensitive, even though she is callous about the feelings of others. When the doll’s house is delivered to the Burnell home, it is Aunt Beryl who insists that it should be kept outside because she finds the fumes of its recent paint…
The Doll’s House by Katherine Mansfield – Summary
‘‘The Doll’s House’’ begins when an elaborate doll’s house is delivered to the home of the Burnell family. It is a gift from Mrs. Hay, who has been staying with them for a while in their house out in the suburbs but has recently returned to the city. The doll’s house is massive, so big…
The Garden Party – Analysis – Essay
Most criticism of Katherine Mansfield’s short story “The Garden Party” concentrates on the story as a truncated bildungsroman—a story of the growth and maturity of a young idealistic character. Critics such as Daniel S. Taylor in “Crashing the Garden Party: A Dream, A Wakening,” for example, see Laura’s initiation as a passage from the “dream…
The Garden Party – Setting
Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party” was written in 1922, during the period between the two world wars. In many ways it reflects the context of its creation. The 1920s saw enormous political and social disturbance throughout Europe. In the new Soviet Union, for example, the Marxist revolution was nearing completion. The Soviet Union’s powerful leader,…
The Garden Party – Literary Devices
Style Katherine Mansfield’s short story “The Garden Party” employs a style that is distinctly modern in its use of impressionistic detail and stream-of-consciousness narrative method. These stylistic features also characterize the works of Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, and other innovative writers of the 1920s and 1930s. The narrative begins in ‘ ‘the middle of things”—…
The Garden Party – Themes
Innocence and Experience “The Garden Party” traces the psychological and moral growth of Laura Sheridan. The story presents her adolescent confusion regarding the social values of her family and her awakening to a more mature perception of reality after her exposure to poverty and death at the carter’s cottage. Laura’s self-consciousness regarding her own youth…