Changing Points Of View, Unchanging Focus

Katherine Mansfield is a central figure in the history of the modern short story. As Ian A. Gordon remarks, "she had the same kind of directive influence on the art of the short story as Joyce had on the novel. After Joyce and Katherine Mansfield neither the novel nor the short story can ever be quite the same again. They beat a track to a higher point from which others can scan a wider horizon." Therefore many aspects of Mansfield's works have been studied, among which her feminist concern and her narrative innovation are attached by critics with great importance. Among many of Mansfield's narrative techniques, changing points of view is one of her dominant narrative strategy. According to the modern narratology, point of view is considered to play the special role as the linkage between the technique and the ideology. The present thesis is intended to study point of view in Mansfield's stories as her narrative strategy to demonstrate her feminist consciousness. In the light of the theories of narratology and feminism, this thesis chooses six representative stories ranging from her juvenile works to her later masterpieces to be the textual basis to analyze how she takes varied points of view—the female character's point of view, the male character's point of view, the multipersonal points of view—to demonstrate her protest against women's subordination in the patriarchal society, her subversion of the male authority and her quest for women's true identity. With her changing points of view, there is one thing unchanged ever, that is, her focus on the fate of women in the male-dominated society.