Insider Or Outsider:The Marginal Figures And Their Ambiguity In Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories

Katherine Mansfield,one of the prominent short-story writers in the early 20^thcentury,is regarded as the vanguard in modernist experiments.The theme of marginality is an important leitmotif in Mansfield’s work.A number of marginalized characters in her stories,like herself,roam around the peripheries of the bourgeois society,socially excluded for divisions of class,gender and ethnicity.Based on the theories of marginal man and literary ambiguity,and incorporating feminist perspectives,this thesis attempts to examine the representation of a variety of marginal figures and their ambiguity in the works by Mansfield by situating these characters in the social-historical conditions of the period from the late Victorian times to the early 20^th century.On the basis of the concept of the“marginal man”,I seek to identify the marginal figures in Mansfield’s short stories as those who are caught between their own individual consciousness and dominant values of bourgeois ideologies embedded in structures of gender,class and race.They are neither outsiders who are completely free from such bourgeois ideologies,nor insiders who are completely submissive to them,but in a state of in-between-ness,presenting ambiguous characteristics of both following the mainstream and developing individual consciousness.The rebellious children of middle-class families,the stigmatized“spinsters”who contradict traditional notions of marriage,and the neglected men who do not conform to Victorian ideal of masculinity are all typical of the marginalized in Katherine Mansfield’s short stories.The thesis is divided into five chapters.Chapter one introduces Mansfield’s life and works,and elaborates on the research questions and significance.From chapter two to chapter four,three kinds of marginal figures as represented in Mansfield’s stories are identified and examined.Chapter two explores the ambiguity of the children and their inner conflict between their innocence and the middle-class gender,class and racial constraints,to which they are required to conform.They are,to some extent,to conform to the social rules,to some extent to venture out to get to know and sympathize with people from different classes or racial origins.Chapter three deals with the spinster’s split personality in terms of self-worth,marital choices,social position and their ambiguous awakening of self-consciousness.Chapter four discusses the marginalized male figures under the gender disorder and gender reversal brought by the World War One.Not fulfilling traditional gender expectations of men,they are ignored by their modern wives and thus confused about their identity in the family,or they struggle in the traditional expectations of male gender role,displaying both conformity and desire to escape,or they have a contradictory attitude towards marriage because of the unemployed status.Chapter five concludes with a summary of the representation of different marginal characters in Mansfield’s work and the variety of ambiguities they present.In summary,ambiguity usually means uncertainty and contradictions.In this thesis,ambiguity refers both to the ambiguity of characterization,that is,the uncertain or ambivalent personality of the marginal figures,and to the various modernist writing techniques used by Mansfield to highlight the ambiguous characterization.The thesis argues that her use of all these ambiguous modernist techniques contributes to the instability of personality or characters’identity.Through the perspectives of these marginalized characters,Mansfield questions the 19^th century fin de siècle middle-class values and prejudices in gender,class and race,challenges outmoded norms of Victorian marital and domestic arrangements,and thus deepens readers’understanding and sympathy for the marginalized.