| Mansfield's short fiction has fascinated readers all over the world forits subtle, delicate style and special visions, which ensures her position inmodernist literature. For a long period of time, critics regarded Mansfieldas a stylist and only studied her style and technique structurally, while thefeminist consciousness revealed in her fiction had been ignored. Recently,some western critics and biographers noticed this and began studies on it.Based on their achievements, this paper intends to explore Mansfield'sfeminist consciousness and her contributions to gender culture throughdetailed analysis of the writer and her writings.This paper falls into five chapters.Chapter I is a brief introduction to Mansfield and her feminism.Mansfield wa born in Wellington, New Zealand. Unbearable of therestrictions in her birthplace, she went to London alone to realize her dreamof becoming a writer. Her London experience was full of frustrations:failure of love, pligh in marriage, pressure and hardships in society for awoman writer..., all these sufferings contributed to her understanding of theoppression on women. Based on her own experiences, she portrayedwomen's lives in her stories. She exposed the social restrictions on womenand questioned women's conventional role. Though she is not a feministtheorist. her consideration of women based on her personal sufferings as awoman is enough to establish her an important position among Englishwomen writers.ChaPter II mainIy discusses the sociaI restrictions on women. Twokinds of restrictions are reflected in Mansfield's stOries. One is therestriction of sociaI ideas. In MansfieId's view, conventional culture hasseriousIy restrained women's minds, making them believe that onIy frOmmarriage and family could they acquire haPpiness. In some of her earlystOries, Mansfield exposes how women are bounded by conventionaI ideasand finally become victims of them. The other restriction on women comesfrom the society. Because the society is dominated by men, it is extremelydifficult for a woman tO find a place in society. Women are always inferiorand vulnerable in society.ChaPter III analyZes Mansfield's discussions on women's role. FirSty,she is critical of women's convenional role. In her collection In a boMion, the writer portrays women's pligh in family life, and sahrizesthose who accePt their identity as their husbands' belongings. Furthermore,Wsfield tries tO dePict a kind of 'modm' women and have a furtherdiscussion on women's role. These women seek freedom blindly andbocome vain and selfish. They even ignOre their husbands and children,which brings crisis to their family life. True, conventiona1 feminine roleshOuld be criticized, bu are those women who seek ffeedom blindly andbecome self centered recommendable? In some of her stories Mansfieldrevea1s her distrust or doubt on their 'modem' behavior.Based on the above analysis, ChaPter IV discusses the writer's senseof disillusionment and her escape frOm the gender role. Her womenprotagOnists find that the haPpiness they have faith in tums out tO be a hOax,and so they feel disillusioned. They are often in a hopeless predicament,terribly tortured but cannot find a way out. Facing all these problems onwomen, the writer chooses a passive way: escape the gender role. On theone hand, many of her women characters feel reluctant to serve as goodmothers or wives, they desire to escaPe frOm the gender role. At the sametime, the depiction of children can be seen as the writer's escaPe frOm thegender role. In Mansfield's view, the adult world is a restficted dark prison,while the children's world is pure, free and worriless. Maybe children'sfreedom is what adult women long fOr.The last chaPter is a summary of the fOregOing chaPters. Owing tO hervivid pOrtraal of women's living situation and her exPosure of women's. lconsciousness, Mansfield's contributions tO modemist literature shou...
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