The Woman Like The Wind

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), New Zealand-born short story writer, advanced the short story as an art form during her short career, critically influencing its renaissance in England. This thesis adopts a branch of traditional psychological criticism unconsciousness theory by Sigmund Freud as the fundamental theory to analyze the form of Katherine Mansfield's Wandering Complex and the reflection of the Wandering Complex in her works. According to Sigmund Freud's theory of unconsciousness, the repressed consciousness is the motivation of the story creators. From the books of Katherine Mansfield, a complex of wandering is caused by affairs ranging from living exile her homeland to the foreign countries, from leaving her namely husband for the strangers. The unrelieved shadow of tuberculosis reflected unconsciously on the theme of escapism, isolation, even disillusionment and on the writing techniques. This thesis is mainly divided into six parts. The introduction part introduces Katherine Mansfield 's receptions and reputation in the field of short stories within the development of history of short stories. In chapter one, Mansfield's life experience is regarded as the source of her Wandering Complex ----is backgrounded on the theory of traditional psychological criticism by Freud. The second chapter goes on delving on the reflections of Wandering Complex in the themes of stories and creations of the characters. The subject of chapter three is her mobile techniques including the multipersonal points of view, indirect-free narrative style, impersonation, slice of life etc. Some special images in the works of Katherine Mansfield are to echo the Wandering Complex in chapter four. In the last chapter, the conclusion of this thesis, Katherine Mansfield saw the short stories as the best literary form that could express the spirit of the modern age. Her significance as a writer, whose fictions and criticisms had a lot of influences, reflected and advanced British modernist aesthetic principles and the whole literature of short stories.