Her First Ball by Katherine Mansfield

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The Dreaded Glass Slipper
In Katherine Mansfield’s “Her First Ball”, she describes an enchanting scene of a young girl debuting into modern society. Her own feelings show through the main protagonist, her own loneliness, and longing for a genuine relationship. Mansfield shows how loneliness affects the writing of an author through all the outer world interferences down trotting her emotions. Her story is somewhat in the beginning a Cinderella story, but the ending is not a happily ever after. The story reveals Mansfield’s personal emotions put into her characters, and she creates a romantic fairytale image to the reader. The focus in the story is whether Leila finds her prince, and has the time of her life. Properties of the Cinderella Complex appear in Mansfield’s “Her First Ball” through instances of imagery, personification, the main character’s disposition, and the dream of a Prince Charming, revealing the authors stress on relationships between men and women.
In Mansfield’s life, she had a broken marriage even though she never divorced her husband he left her feeling more sorrow than joy. Without the presence of her spouse, she becomes obsessed with fairytales; she writes a statement to her husband saying, “In 1920 she writes to him “I see the Fairy Tale as our history really. It’s a tremendous symbol. The Prince and Princess do wed in the end […]” (Lederman page 35). Her husband married her for the money, and he never really kept her that much company. The absence of love from her husband, her father, and her lost brother, constructs an obsession over romance and relationships between men and women. Her husband never shows that he truly loves her making her turn toward the world of fantasy and romance to fill that void. M...

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...Mansfield’s marriage and heartless husband end up helping her create her style and obsession with fairytales. The Cinderella Complex affects women in society by making them seem weak and constantly in need of the opposite gender’s aid and assistance. The imagery and personification that she uses to create the mystical and enchanting scene in the reader’s mind truly makes the short story into a work of romantic fantasy fiction. The disposition of the main character shows how the author thinks and strains the importance of relationship between men and women. The dream and concept of a non-existent Prince Charming ruin the image of true love and wreck havoc on the minds of women and young girls you take that idea of infatuation and turn that image into true love. The Cinderella Complex affects Mansfield in her style of writing and her feelings toward love and romance.

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