A Study Of Women’s Tragic Existence In Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories And Her Feminist Limitations

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was a distinguished yet controversial woman writer in English literature. Born in New Zealand, Mansfield spent her whole life in Britain and achieved her international fame. Literary world of New Zealand highly praised her as the most important writer, while British counterpart identified her as the similarly important literary revolutionist as other renowned contemporary writers such as D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, for her equivalent contributions to British literature. Being a pure adherent and advocator of Modernist literary trend of the twentieth century, Mansfield skillfully and adroitly employed the modernistic writing techniques in varieties of her works.Mansfield’s short stories covered various kinds of characters, the young and the old, men and women, the poor and the rich, and female characters deserve a separate study for those heroines under her description have gone through or are experiencing the same destiny-tragic existence. The study of Mansfield’s short stories has been prevailing both domestically and internationally, in such aspects as narrative techniques, poetic writing style and abstract themes, and the analysis of women characters in her fictions is particularly popular.Targeting at women characters and through the study of women’s tragic existence, this thesis aims at analyzing Mansfield’s Limitations in Feminism as well as factors contributing to her limitations in feminism. To study and explore the limitations of Mansfield’s Feminist thoughts and their causes from the perspective of Feminism are the main creative points of this thesis, accounting for its academic significance.