Modernist Narrative Strategies Of Katherine Mansfield's Short Stories

Katharine Mansfield, a New Zealand born woman writer, is a central figure in the development of the modern short story. She is recognized as one of the significant writers in the literary scene of the time, as an original and experimental writer.Mansfield's stories are almost a unique species of writing, with her "plotless" story, quiet clarity of details, and "Poetic Prose." Her short stories, like a mixed bouquet of flowers, are varied in styles, but are not completely unconnected with each other. Like a collection of paintings which illuminate one another, they live in organic harmony, especially in terms of aesthetic form.Beneath the outward simplicity of Mansfield's work is the most wondrous artifice that invites the reader to speculate. Through the use of free indirect narrative style and frequent shifts in narrative perspectives, she immerses herself in the inner life of her characters and vividly reveal their psychological states;meanwhile, she evokes the emotional response from the reader, and brings the reader into the characters psychological states, thus creating empathy. The easy adoption of different masks and different voices is one of the principal skills on which her success as a fiction writer rests. She was a pioneer in the use of interior monologue and the presentation of shifting viewpoints.Mansfield writes narratives that do not rely on plot for their organization—her narratives center on mood, rhythm, and sensory impressions. The "prelude" method—a plotless series of episodes that "just unfold and open," like the opening process of flowers—was something quite new in the English short story. Her primary literary concern is the mentality of human beings. Actually she conveys her ideas so well that the reader can feel everywhere the subtle feeling, mood and atmosphere expressed in her stories. She concentrates on the inner world of the characters, and she carefully chooses details to create the external atmosphere in accordance with the state of minds of the characters, thus achieving a fusion of scenic atmosphere and the internal world of the characters and eliciting in the reader an intuitive response to the characters' deep self. Many details in her work are symbolic, which greatly enrich the connotation and add to the aesthetic beauty of her stories.Another remarkable feature of Mansfield's mature stories is her flexible manipulation of time in her short stories. In her mature stories, she develops two methods: one is her fragmentary narrative structure, that is, the stories follow a sequential time line but that line is not significant in itself. The elements of the stories are arranged spatially, though partially time sequence still exists. All the fragments are often put together on the basis of a semantic meaning, a theme or a mood. In such stories, she breaks the dominance of narrative in fiction and achieves immediacy. The fragments are organized in spatial order. Despite their apparent disorder, they illuminate each other and cohere naturally, without narrative linking. There is apparently no form but a quality, and the fragments exhibit this quality. This fragmentary narrative structure creates vivid cinematic visual effect and achieves simultaneity. Mansfield's more original treatment of narrative time is circumlocution, which establishes a central point of reference and then moves in circles about it, going back and forward in time. Her circumlocution establishes the sense of richness, a further thickening of the texture through the "subtle variation of tense". Such manipulation helps to create a comic static atmosphere and reveal the complex character of her personas, and together with all her narrative strategies enables her to reveal her themes more effectively.Mansfield's innovative narrative techniques are not a sudden development. They evolve from the literary traditions and are influenced by social environment, especially the thoughts of some philosophers which have a far-reaching impact on modern Western philosophies and literature. Freud's psychoanalytic approach, Bergson's conception of intuitionism and "duration", that is, "psychological time", influence the narrative pattern and content of modernist literature, including those of Mansfield's;Mansfield also draws inspirations from other forms of arts, such as impressionist painting, film, poetry, music and drama. Mansfield composes with language, plays music and paints pictures with her words. Her writing is a fusion of various forms of arts.This thesis is an exploration of modernist narrative strategies of Katherine Mansfield's short stories. By means of exemplification and comparison, this thesis mainly adopts an eclectic approach to Mansfield on the basis of a close reading of her 88 stories in combination with her journals and letters as well as her biographies, with the guidance of relative narrative theories. The present author attempts to examine the relationships between the narrative strategies and the themes of the stories and trace backthe origins of the narrative strategies. Studies have been done concerning Mansfield's narrative strategies, but they usually focus on one certain story of Mansfield's, for example, "The Garden Party" or "The Daughters of the Late Colonel". As a consequence, many of her good stories have been neglected. This thesis is then partly the outcome of an intended study of a wider range of Mansfield's short stories. Moreover, few scholars have done a systematical study of her narrative strategies together with the themes of her short stories;even fewer have probed into the contributing factors of her employment of these special narrative strategies. The present author desires to fill in these blanks.The thesis comes to the conclusion that Mansfield has transformed the short story in English and contributed in essential ways to Modernist literature. With her innovative talents and stylistic brilliance, she advances the short story as an art form;during her short career, she helps to shape the modern short story form.