A Study Of The Paradoxes In Katherine Mansfield's Short Stories

New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield is one of the masters in modernism with the pure style and delicate words. She devotes herself to innovations of short story genre and thus makes the great contribution to the development of literature in Europe. Inheriting the Victorian female literary tradition, Katherine Mansfield portrays a series of ordinary lives and images with subtle observation and penetrating insight. Consciously somewhat, she integrates her own experience and the ambivalence about her identity into the process of her writing, which gives the works a unique style of paradoxes and ambiguities as a result. The present study attempts to discover the link between the author's suffering fate and her works, and tries to probe into her ambivalent value in the stories by deep appreciation.This thesis falls into five parts. Part one includes a brief review of Mansfield's life, works and the themes of her short stories. Part two focuses on the ambivalent descriptions in nature from Mansfield's view. In this part, the employment and comparison of impressionism and symbolism are discussed in her stories. The third part stresses on analyzing the characters'paradoxes in her stories. The paradoxes contain the relationship between men and women in marriage, the protagonists'narcissism, and the children's purity. Also in it, the analysis of the paradoxes of life and death show that the narrator's sickly life gives her special view on the destiny. The interpretation shows Mansfield's epiphany for the marriage, family and human nature. The fourth part devotes itself to the analysis of ambivalent relationship between society and people. It argues that Mansfield's dual nationalities make possible her depictions about the isolated exiles and descriptions of disillusion. In her stories, the protagonists are always helpless and alienated in reality in spite of illusion. Finally, based on the above chapters, the last part is conclusion. By the employment of paradoxes, Mansfield achieves her ideal so successfully that readers can feel the themes of melancholy, frustration, indifference with which she wants to share.