The Feminist Concern In Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories

Katherine Mansfield, a prominent20th century female short-story writer, the founder of New-Zealand literature, is among one of the few writers who fully concentrate their creativity on short-story writing and thus establish their fame on this. She works assiduously throughout her whole life and never stops her career of short-story writing and literature creation. She insists on making innovations on various artistic forms and literary styles, thus deeply y broadens the connotation and capacity that short-story writing can bear as an artistic genre. Her literary work exerts a profound effect on both the creation and development of modem fiction, which had long been ignored and under-estimated by traditional English writers.For quite a long time, the study of literary critics on Katherine Mansfield has been focused on her crafty modernist writing techniques and gracefully exquisite, prose like writing styles. However, her deep thinking of female issues and her great feminist concerns has long been ignored. As a matter of fact, the abundant female themes and subject matters, the plenty female characters and images that the writer creates are the chief concern and upmost essence of her literary creation. In that famous female world depicted by Mansfield, women are oppressed both physically and mentally by the patriarchal capitalist society. Mansfield orients her whole work on the pathetic living circumstance of women, and expresses her deep concern of women’s social status and liberation movement in her short stories.Starting from historic angle, this dissertation looks into the theory of feminist movement and the social and historical background of the Victorian era, in the aim of exploring and investigating what Mansfield’s unique feminist concerns represent and the cause for them. Moreover, by depicting and analyzing various vivid women images and characters, the oppression of women both physically and mentally by male-dominated patriarchal society that Mansfield tries to criticize and dissect can be expressed, upon which a possible literary solution of emancipating women that Mansfield spares no efforts to expound can be further realized.Mansfield sincerely yearns for a tentative reconciliation between the two sexes. She thinks that as far as patriarchy exists, the situation of male domination and female submission can never be changed. In her short stories, she proposes that both men and women abandon their conventional social roles and come to a spiritual consensus on their respective social roles and living conditions. She also points out that women should rely on themselves for breaking through the restriction of traditional values and patriarchal oppression.Today Mansfield’s reflection on women’s identity is still of significance for the self-construction of contemporary women’s identity. Her revelation and condemnation of the submission, isolation and exclusion between the two sexes help to arouse modern women’s self-identity and their struggle for a more whole and dignified life. With the feminist ideals she upholds and her deep concern of women’s fate, women worldwide of all ranks and classed can be encouraged to strive for a better life and realize their own values.