A Study On Female Characters’ Psyche In Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories From The Perspective Of Psychoanalytic Feminism

Katherine Mansfield, “the queen of world short story”, has written several prestigious works during her short thirty-four-year life. Her works paved the way for modern short story writing field, not just about her writing features, the thoughts her works shows as well. However, unlike Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield’s works and thoughts are not paid close attention to by the scholars, especially in China. And the few studies about her are almost all on her writing features, the analysis about the female characters psyche is absent. So it is necessary for us to dig the depth of her works.Psychoanalytic feminism is a new branch of feminism, and the origin of feminism can be dated back to Mary Wollstonecraft, who was the founder of the first wave feminism that started from the second half of 19 th century. Even though Katherine Mansfield has never claimed that she was a feminist, there is a delicate description of females’ psyche in her works, which means that she paid a close attention to females’ life at her time. So this paper will use psychoanalytic feminism to analyze the female characters’ psyche in her works.There are four chapters in this paper. In chapter one, this paper will give an introduction to the life of Katherine Mansfield and her short stories which we will analyze in the paper as well as the root, the development and the current trend of psychoanalytic feminism; in the second chapter, this paper will make a detailed analysis of the female characters’ psyche from three groups: the young little girls, the unmarried young ladies and the married women. In the third chapter, this paper will do some researches about the causes for the formation of these females’ psyche. In the last chapter, this paper will make a conclusion about the whole thesis.