The Men With Masks

Katherine Mansfield, one of the most distinguished writers in New Zealand, made a breakthrough in short stories. She evolved a distinctive prose style, using stream of consciousness to portray a psychological moment. Her fictions mainly focus upon one moment, a crisis or a turning point to illustrate people’s psychological conflicts, uncover human isolation and question traditional roles of men and women. Studies on Mansfield can be reduced to several types:theme study, stylistic criticism, biological study, influence study, text reading, interpretation from different theoretical schools, such as psychoanalytic criticism, feminist criticism, colonial and post-colonial criticism and reader-response criticism. However, there are few systematic studies at home and abroad concerning the male characters in Mansfield’s works. The male characters in Bliss and other stories will be discussed in the thesis from the perspective of Jung’s persona theory.The persona is the mask worn to greet the world. To get along well in society, most of people must play certain roles socially and professionally, thus the persona is necessary for survival. It enables us to get along with people, especially those we don’t like. However, persona also will be harmful due to one’s poor management. Katherine Mansfield herself agreed that one person should wear many kinds of mask and change among them all his life. Marks were so important for her that she never showed up her real personality. She was so obsessed with different masks that her characters often seemed to exist in such disunity. Mansfield’s male characters, lost in their persona like her, cannot find their real self, or fail to find a proper persona to adapt to society.The thesis mainly analyzes four characters in Bliss and other stories, including Stanley Burnell in Prelude, Reginald Peacock in Mr. Reginald Peacock’s Day, Ian French in Feuille D’ablbum, and Robert in The Man without a Temperature. Stanley and Reginald both overdevelop their professional mask. Stanley is the ruler in business and family, who is so proud that he causes pressure and impression in other family members; Reginald Peacock cannot take off his mask of a singing teacher so that he lives in his imaginary world and has much complaint about reality. On the contrast, Ian French underdevelops his social persona, revealing his fear of outside world. He does not know how to communicate with others and thus locks himself in the small room. Superficially, he is innocent, insistent on his painting; but in fact, since Ian has no right knowledge of himself he cannot realize that his pursuit for perfect comes from his endless fear in heart. And Robert wears a persona of good husband to fulfill the wife’s expectation. But the long two years during which his wife does not get better diminishes his hope. The conflict between his will to be a good husband and his hope for liberation gets more and more intense. He seems to forget his other personas except husband. Robert loses enthusiasm to communicate with others, giving up the other social roles he should play. He wants to escape from this dilemma, but in vain.