Feministic Women Images In Katherine Mansfield's Short Stories

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) is a distinguished short story writer in modern English literature. Throughout her life, she worked diligently in literary productions, experimented with a lot of revolutionary innovations in the short story genre and thus made a great contribution to the development of modern fiction. For a long period of time, critics regarded Mansfield as a stylist and only studied her style and writing techniques, while the feminist consciousness revealed in her fiction was more or less ignored. Recently, some Western critics and biographers have noticed this and begun their studies of it. This paper intends to discuss the feministic women images depicted in Mansfield's short stories.Those women images can be mainly divided into five types, that is, the radical modern women, the lonely city women, the muted mothers and submissive wives, the conformed women and the disillusioned women. All the women characters are chosen from the works of the different periods of her literary career. Their images reflect the development of her feminism.Mansfield's contemplation upon women's fate will always encourage women all over the world to struggle on for a better life.