The Theme Of Confinement In Katherine Mansfield’s Short Fiction

Katherine Mansfield is a world-renowned New Zealand short story writer. Recognized as a most brilliant female modernist, Mansfield left a literary legacy of over 100 short stories and a vast amount of miscellaneous writings such as poems, book reviews, letters, and diary entries. This substantial literary output wins her an important place in the history of English literature and offers a profound array of texts for modern critical analysis.Mansfield, throughout her writing career, quested for the true meaning of human life. As an experience more felt than susceptible to interpretation, confinement pervades both Mansfield’s life path and her meteoric artistic career. It is clearly perceivable in some of her short stories. This thesis applies Michel Foucault’s theory of Panopticism, a theory about the mechanism of disciplinarization through mental incarceration, to a reading of Mansfield’s short fiction. It examines the way in which Mansfield handled the theme of confinement in her writing.The thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter One presents an introduction to Katherine Mansfield the writer and her works. It also offers an overview of Katherine Mansfield studies, with particular focus on some of the most recent critical developments. After a brief outline of Michel Foucault’s theory of Panopticism, this chapter goes on to explain the purpose of the study and the structure of this thesis. Chapter Two investigates the domestic space in stories such as “The Doll’s House”, “New Dresses”, and “The Man without a Temperament”, proposing that the idea of family is always a restrictive notion to Mansfield. Parental supervision over children, voyeurism coming from outside the family house, and the binding power of marriage over husbands and wives alike tell about the caged experience of Mansfield’s home subjects. Chapter Three examines the(post)colonial existence of white New Zealanders in stories like “Ole Underwood”, “Old Tar”, and “The Woman at the Store”. In each of Mansfield’s early New Zealand stories, the imperial power appears to restrict its white colonials to a limited space of living. The surveilling gaze from the Empire estranges the Pakeha New Zealanders, rendering the deported, deprived, and dislocated white colonials rootless in a potential homeland. Chapter Four looks at Mansfield’s stories that record her own border-crossing appearance in Continental Europe. In stories such as “Honesty”, “Germans at Meat”, and “An Indiscreet Journey”, gaps between the antipodean outsiders and the hosts stand out as culturally insurmountable. The overhanging power exercised through a unified national identity monitors lonely travellers and cultural others. Chapter Five concludes that the experience of confinement is at all levels a major concern to Mansfield. By framing her characters in the panoptic space, Mansfield questions the troubled human individuality of her time, and depicts the racial, political, and international contexts that her literary edifice is built against. Making a direct response to the confined experience of living in a world where regulative power is indelibly ingrained in every aspect of human life, Mansfield gestures toward a hope for a mobile, unconstrained identity and existence both of herself and of the entire human race.