The Quest for Autonomy amid Shifting Gender Expectations and Relationships in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories

Summary

Often overshadowed by contemporaries such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, who are widely acknowledged as two of the forerunners of literary modernism, Katherine Mansfield has, until the last couple of decades, been more or less overlooked, and her short stories remained under the radar as a topic for analysis. Yet recently, almost a century after her passing, there has been a renewed interest in her works, which are increasingly becoming the subject of discussion among modernist scholars, many of whom are returning to the conversation with a fresh arsenal of critical theories and newly published autobiographical material that potentially shed light on the author’s oeuvre. Recent scholarship is particularly concerned with recognising her contributions to the modernist tradition, as well as reassessing earlier criticism that may have been quick to jump to conclusions, especially with respect to narrative style and themes.

One such theme is Mansfield’s attitude towards gender – her oeuvre offers a telling reflection on the state of women during the early twentieth century and deals with issues ranging from public to private. In many of her stories, girls and women, often portrayed as innocent and vulnerable, are juxtaposed against men who are described as beasts. On the surface, therefore, it is easy to treat her works as feminist simply by virtue of her gender and subject matter.

Existing studies tend to examine the notion of gender in Mansfield’s stories with respect to stereotypes, be it in conformity to or subversion of them. For instance, Pamela Dunbar notes that

The ‘coupling’ stories were conceived according to the traditional notions that relations between the sexes are, and ought to be, ones of binary opposition […] Yet while appearing to celebrate sharply defined gender differences many of these stories actually engage in subverting them. Characters who at first present as models of masculinity or femininity are shown to bear the qualities normally ascribed to their gender opposites: women turn out to be stronger than their partners, men are devoured by a terrible inner weakness.