“Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another,” the novelist Elizabeth Bowen argued. What is read and discussed is what the characters create, what they do, how they react, etc. Katherine Mansfield recapitulates exactly that through her creative and illustrating short stories. Mansfield takes you on a ride throughout her stories through the use of many different literary techniques displaying feelings and emotions. Katherine Mansfield wrote “A Dill Pickle,” a short story based on two former lovers. Through the use of symbols and themes, the short story takes us through the world of these two characters, who show changes they have gone through that essentially reopened the wounds of their past relationship.
"She dressed like a tart and behaved like a bitch. She seems to be an unpleasant and utterly unscrupulous character. She's gone every sort of hog since she was seventeen ... and she stinks like a civet cat that has taken to streetwalking." (Hansen 1) That is very harsh thing to say which came from the mouth of Virginia Woolf, another writer during the time period. Now although she nor a lot of people were very fond of Katherine Mansfield, people did admit to liking this ambitious young writer. By the time Mansfield died, she wrote 72 stories, mastered playing the cello, did a good amount of traveling and became a magazine editor as well as accomplished many other things in a matter of 35 years. Katherine was a passionate woman and she lived outside the norm of most young women of her time. Furthermore, had a free spirit and risked everything as well as always having a form of glitz in her life. She displayed herself as flashy and would change her personality so easily, as well as her writing. It was dif...
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Hanson, Clare. "Prelude Katherine Mansfield and Symbolism: the 'artist's
method'' in ." The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (1981): n. pag.
SAGE Journals Online. Web. 7 Mar. 2011.
25.full.pdf+html>.
L'Heureux, John. "Talk that Walks: How Hemingway's Dialogue Powers A Story."
Wall Street Journal: n. pag. Print. Dialogue in Fiction.
Mansfield, Katherine. From Bliss and Other Stories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1920. 228-238. Print.
Mansfield, Katherine. Preface. The Garden Party And Other Stories. By Mansfield.
London: London Constable and Bombay Company Sydney Limited, 1922. N. pag.
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A man named Bilal Nasir Khan once said, “The most painful goodbyes are the ones never said and never explained”. In the poem “Changes” by D. Ginette Clarke, the speaker is eager to understand the reasoning behind the end of his friendship with someone who he seems to have been very close with. As one reads through the poem, the strong connection that the persona feels between him and his friend becomes quite obvious. Granting the persona’s endeavour to express his feelings towards his failed friendship in a calm manner, he essentially comes off as a curious, eager, and desperate man. Clarke represents these specific characteristics of the speaker through the use of repetition, word choice, and punctuation.
Is a woman's strength determined by her endurance to stay in a hurtful relationship or is it determined by her ability to move on? The early twentieth century is known to women as the "era of exuberance." (Gilbert 1205) During the early twentieth century women began to find the answer to the question at hand deeply rooted within themselves. The answer for Katherine Anne Porter seemed to be her ability to move on based on the actions she chose in her real life. Does her literature tell a different story? Born in Indian Creek, Texas on May 15, 1980, Callie Russell Porter spent most of her life outside of the state of Texas. In 1915 after nine years of marriage to John Henry Koontz she divorced him claiming "nothing in common and physical abuse." (Davidson) At this point she changes her name to Katherine Anne Porter, her late-grandmother's name. At the young age of 25 Porter had already broken the role of a traditional woman that was known to that time period.
"Unit 2: Reading & Writing About Short Fiction." ENGL200: Composition and Literature. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011. 49-219. Web. 19 Apr. 2014.
Miss Brill is a story about an old woman that lacks companionship and self-awareness. She lives by herself and goes through life in a repetitive manner. Each Sunday, Miss Brill ventures down to the park to watch and listen to the band play. She finds herself listening not only to the band, but also to strangers who walk together and converse before her. Her interest in the lives of those around her shows the reader that Miss Brill lacks companionship.
Callie Russell Porter, the fourth of five children, was born on May 15, 1890 in Indian Creek, Texas. After her mother, Mary Alice (Jones) Porter, died of tuberculosis or bronchitis when Porter was two years old, her father, Harrison Boone, took her and her siblings to their grandmother's home in Kyle, Texas. Porter was enrolled in public and private schools until the age of 15. One of the schools she attended was called Thomas School, a private Methodist school located in San Antonio, Texas, for one year in 1904 where she had her only formal education after grammar school. Porter's grandmother, Catherine Porter, was a great storyteller who provided her with an early appreciation of fiction.
Margaret had huge dreams of one day becoming a writer, but those dreams were put on hold when her father suddenly passed away in 1835. At this time, her mother was also sick and it became her responsibility to take care of her family’s finances. There were not many job opportunities available to women during this time, she found a teaching job and accepted the position. She first began teaching at Bronson Alcott’s Temple School in Boston and taught there until she went on to teach at the well-kn...
Mary Wollstonecraft lived in a time where women had no right to vote, no right to education beyond what their mother or governess taught them, and basically no right to individuality or an opinion. They were considered possessions and virtually had no mind of their own. She realized that this was a problem of society and openly voiced her opinions on the matter. She wrote the book A Vindication of the Rights of Women in response to a literary response to the society's so-called proper behavior of a woman and what her rights should be. But her opinions were brought on by more that the ability to think for herself; she suffered much during her childhood and throughout the years to come. Wollstonecraft dealt with the beating of her mother and sister, death of a close friend, and even a nervous breakdown of her sister. Her own experiences in her life inspired her to write a book that would cause her to be criticized harshly for her radical views.
When I first read some of Miss Porter’s work, I came away feeling depressed, empty and wondering why she even wrote. Her stories seemed unfinished, incomplete and pointless. However, I find myself thinking about those works, discovering new things and realizing a deeper meaning in the stories.
...t really catch the readers’ attention. Although she wasn’t writing in the major eras, she did write in the era where the style of writing was changing. This allowed her to be able to write freely and truly express herself through her words and illusions.
The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson is a personal account, written by Mary Rowlandson in 1682, of what life in captivity was like. Her narrative of her captivity by Indians became popular in both American and English literature. Mary Rowlandson basically lost everything by an Indian attack on her town Lancaster, Massachusetts in 1675; where she is then held prisoner and spends eleven weeks with the Wampanoag Indians as they travel to safety. What made this piece so popular in both England and America was not only because of the great narrative skill used be Mary Rowlandson, but also the intriguing personality shown by the complicated character who has a struggle in recognizing her identity. The reoccurring idea of food and the word remove, used as metaphors throughout the narrative, could be observed to lead to Mary Rowlandson’s repression of anger, depression, and realization of change throughout her journey and more so at the end of it.
Katherine Mansfield's "Miss Brill" perfectly captures the phases one's mind goes through when faced with becoming old. Elderly people tend to be nostalgic, even sentimental about their youth. In later years, the nostalgia can develop into senility or fantasy. The ermine fur in "Miss Brill" is the catalyst of her nostalgia and symbolizes the passing of time in three stages: an expectant youth, a vital adulthood, and finally, a development into old age and fantasy.
The reader reads in order to feel sorrow for the protagonist in a manner the reader can assimilate. Yet, it seems that the nature of Margaret’s thoughts is inherently dialogic or, to work with Duke’s terms, empathic: neither Margaret nor the reader uses the text in order to solicit pity from the other. What function would a “pity party” serve a reader by herself? To the contra...
Virginia Woolf, in her novels, set out to portray the self and the limits associated with it. She wanted the reader to understand time and how the characters could be caught within it. She felt that time could be transcended, even if it was momentarily, by one becoming involved with their work, art, a place, or someone else. She felt that her works provided a change from the typical egotistical work of males during her time, she makes it clear that women do not posses this trait. Woolf did not believe that women could influence as men through ego, yet she did feel [and portray] that certain men do hold the characteristics of women, such as respect for others and the ability to understand many experiences. Virginia Woolf made many of her time realize that traditional literature was no longer good enough and valid. She caused many women to become interested in writing, and can be seen as greatly influential in literary history
The point of view that Katherine Mansfield has chosen to use in "Miss Brill" serves two purposes. First, it illustrates how Miss Brill herself views the world and, second, it helps the reader take the same journey of burgeoning awareness as Miss Brill.
Katherine Mansfield belongs to a group of female authors that have used their financial resources and social standing to critique the patriarchal status quo. Like Virginia Woolf, Mansfield was socioeconomically privileged enough to write influential texts that have been deemed as ‘proto-feminist’ before the initial feminist movements. The progressive era in which Mansfield writes proves to be especially problematic because, “[w]hile the Modernist tradition typically undermined middle-class values, women … did not have the recognized rights necessary to fully embrace the liberation from the[se] values” (Martin 69). Her short stories emphasized particular facets of female oppression, ranging from gendered social inequality to economic classism, and it is apparent that “[p]oor or rich, single or married, Mansfield’s women characters are all victims of their society” (Aihong 101). Mansfield’s short stories, “The Garden Party” and “Miss Brill”, represent the feminist struggle to identify traditional patriarchy as an inherent caste system in modernity. This notion is exemplified through the social bonds women create, the naïve innocence associated with the upper classes, and the purposeful dehumanization of women through oppressive patriarchal methods. By examining the female characters in “The Garden Party” and “Miss Brill”, it is evident that their relationships with other characters and themselves notify the reader of their encultured classist preconceptions, which is beneficial to analyze before discussing the sources of oppression.