A Study Of Intergroup Conflicts In "a Dill Pickle"

Katherine Mansfield is a legend in British short story history. Her “A Dill Pickle”catches numerous people’s eyes for its peculiar artistic writing techniques, such as stream of consciousness, symbolism and psychological description etc. A great many researchers have conducted elaborate researches on it mainly from the perspectives of feminism, symbolism, artistic features, narratology, linguistics, comparative literature and so forth to try to explain the conflicts between the hero and the heroine. However,most of them probed into interpersonal behavior in the short story, and few studies have been made concerning the intergroup behavior.A branch of social psychology, social identity theory places an emphasis on individuals’ social identification with groups, and exposes the internal psychological mechanism of intergroup behavior and sorts social behavior into two extremes:interpersonal behavior and intergroup behavior. Nevertheless, there is almost neither pure interpersonal behavior nor pure intergroup behavior in real life. Interpersonal behavior and intergroup behavior occur in humans’ interaction at the same time. It is probable that there are ingroup bias, accentuation effect and the relevant threats to social identity while people belonging to different groups get along with each other.Ingroup bias, accentuation effect and threats to social identity tend to cause intergroup conflicts. The thesis intends to probe into “A Dill Pickle” to find out intergroup conflicts between the hero and the heroine and the reasons why those intergroup conflicts occur, using qualitative analysis, close reading and historical approach.The intergroup conflicts between the hero and the heroine are gender conflicts and social class conflicts generated by their ingroup bias, threats to social identity and accentuation effect due to their different genders and social classes. As the hero and the heroine are grouped into different genders and women’s social status is lower than men’s for Britain was a male-dominated society in the early twentieth century, the hero views his own group as higher than the heroine Vera’s. Therefore, the hero’s ingroup bias comes into being and meanwhile the heroine Vera’s gender identity is threatened,leading to her employment of strategy of social competition.Judging from the short story, Vera’s social class is higher than the hero’s. When they fall in love six years ago, Vera magnifies the differences between her and the hero and further exacerbates their conflicts with her ingroup bias and accentuation effect.The hero’s social class identity is threatened simultaneously, so he is self-abased for hissocial class is indeed lower than Vera’s and adopts the strategy of individual mobility.When they meet the first time after they break up, there are intergroup conflicts between them too. But the reasons why the intergroup conflicts occur have changed.Six years later, Vera is in financial trouble and the hero makes a fortune. Vera still has ingroup bias with the thought that her social class is higher than the hero’s and then the hero’s social class identity is threatened correspondingly. The hero uses the strategy of social creativity to handle the situation owing to his wealth. In other words, he chooses a new dimension of financial situation to make a comparison with Vera.All in all, the intergroup conflicts caused by the hero’s and the heroine’s intergroup behavior are also the reasons why the hero and heroine cannot be reconciled.