| Katherine Mansfield(1888-1923) is a prominent female novelist in the literary history of both Britain and New Zealand. She made a graven contribution to the development of European short stories with her unique narrative techniques and artistic style, and thus she was honored as “English Chekhov”. Her short stories are not only exquisite in style and delicate in structure, but also creative in adopting narrative techniques and handling the plots of the stories. Meanwhile, the stories reflect Mansfield’s acute insight and her sympathy and worry about the destiny of women in her era.The study on Katherine Mansfield and her works at home and abroad is mainly divided into six aspects: biographical research, stylistic research, feminist criticism,thematic study, comparative study and the study of narrative techniques. However,according to the statistics from CNKI by May, 2015, there are few scholars researching Mansfield’s fiction from the perspective of Narrative Voice. Based on Susan S.Lanser’s book Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice(1992), this thesis tries to probe into the patterns and aesthetic functions of Narrative Voice in Mansfield’s works. Findings of the study are mainly as following:(1) Authorial Voice is adopted by Mansfield to declare herself on her attitude towards the characters of her stories, either sympathetic or ironic. Free Indirect Speech presents the characters’ suffocating emotion more vividly and authentically, which contributes to the emotional interaction between the author and readers.(2) Personal Voice reveals the dangling emotion of the character, which is actually a reflection of Mansfield’s identity anxiety about herself.(3) Communal Voice is presented in the form of “singular” in Mansfield’s selected stories. It is applied to convey the oppressed emotion of women in her contemporary society and show the miserable living conditions of the self-reliant females and the awakening of English middle-class women’s self-consciousness,which expresses Mansfield’s concerns and reflection on the destiny of her contemporary females.Based on Susan S. Lanser’s theory of Narrative Voice, this thesis exerts efforts to interpret the emotional factors of Narrative Voice in Mansfield’s short stories. By concentrating on the three modes of Narrative Voice in Mansfield’s selected short stories, it explains the significance of different modes of voices in presenting the psychology of the characters, manifesting the author’s attitude and strengthening the themes of the stories. |
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