On Narcissism, Self-examination, And Self-identity In Katherine Mansfield's Works

Katherine Mansfield is one of the most famous short story writers in Englishliterature. In her stories, she adopts many successful innovations in narrativetechnique, especially internal monologue, by which she has made her uniquecontribution to the development of the short story writing.Katherine Mansfield's stories seem to be very simple because they are for themost part domestic. Her stories mostly deal with the middle-class life, sometimes sheshows her sympathy for the lower-class. Actually, her works give us powerful andvaluable insights into human life. Her stories are profound, and they not only dealwith the themes of death, poverty and love, but also center on women problems. Whatthis paper intends to analyze is the psychological change of female characters inKatherine Mansfield's short stories.Although Mansfield never proclaims her a feminist, she provides sufficientevidence of her feminist views. She is especially concerned with women's life. In herstories, women suffer a lot and try to free themselves from the reality. By displayingwomen's unsatisfactory social status in her stories, Mansfield has helped to arousemodem women's self-consciousness.Mansfield is successful in psychological analysis of characters, esp. womencharacters. She is good at using internal monologue and psychological analysis toportray the characters. In her stories, women characters' psychological processes arefrom narcissism to self-examination to self-identity. The women in Mansfield'sstories are very traditional. On the one hand, they hate the current life and prefer adifferent life; on the other hand, they don't want to destroy their present lives andtheir families. In their inner heart, they still love their families. Therefore, the realityforces them to go back into their real life. They become compromised to their lives.In another word, the psychological change of the women characters is from escapingfrom reality to facing reality then to accepting reality.This dissertation contains six chapters. Chapterâ… is the introduction part.Chapterâ…¡is devoted to the examination of the relationship between Katherine Mansfield and Psychoanalytic Feminism, and Chapterâ…¢is employed to demonstratethe psychological change of narcissism, self-examination, and self-identity of thefemale characters in Katherine Mansfield's short story. Chapterâ…£shows the symbolsin Katherine Mansfield's short story which reflect the psychological change.Chapterâ…¤discusses the similarities and differences between Katherine Mansfield.Then comes the conclusion.