scholarly journals Oh, Mother, Who Art Thou? : The Heart of Maternal Darkness in the Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-89
Author(s):  
Anindita Sarkar
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Women Characters ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Adrienne Rich ◽  
The Real ◽  
Mother Daughter Relationship ◽  
Cultural Construct ◽  
Traditional Assumption

Our culture assumes: No love is as great as that of a mother for her child. Motherhood has been perpetually associated with self-effacement and self-abnegation. Adrienne Rich while making a distinction between the actual lived experience of a mother and the institution of motherhood has argued that motherhood is a cultural construct and a far cry from the real experience of mothering. This article traces and examines representations of motherhood in the select short stories of Katherine Mansfield, in the light of Adrienne Rich’s theories in Of Woman Born. Much like Adrienne Rich, Mansfield discredits the traditional assumption that to be a mother is an essential pre-requisite to be a ‘real woman’. Mansfield’s women characters unleash a plurality of voices that aid the readers at viewing maternity as an ambiguous experience. Instead of romanticizing and idealizing the mother-daughter relationship, she offers a problematic connection between both the figures, often pitting them as rivals against each other. Her women characters progressively revolt from within the four walls of the household by their intermittent display of anger and deliberate attempts at failing to conform to the monolithic ideals of femininity.

Patterns of Time and the Maternal in the Short Stories of Elizabeth Bishop and Katherine Mansfield

2019 ◽  
pp. 223-236
Author(s):  
Laura Helyer
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Elizabeth Bishop ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Prose Poems ◽  
Mother Daughter Relationship ◽  
Narrative Prose ◽  
Poetic Prose ◽  
The Village

This chapter discusses aspects of rhythm, poetic form, time and the archival in Bishop’s prose and is organised around a discussion of the ethics of the mother-daughter relationship in the autobiographical story, ‘In the Village.’ Bishop’s short stories are analysed in terms of poetic prose and as prose poems. This resonates with Katherine Mansfield’s lyrical, impressionistic experiments in the short story and her ideas about form and formlessness in narrative. Bishop’s interest in representations of time, memory and a modernist aesthetic in narrative prose are persuasively articulated in her key critical essays (‘Time’s Andromedas’, ‘Dimensions for a Novel’). The chapter ultimately proposes that Mansfield can be understood as a significant influence on Bishop’s prose style, helping her to determine her own original fictional ‘voice’ as well as her structural and thematic concerns in prose.

Representations of Women in Selected Short Stories by Katherine Mansfield Viewed Through Seventeenth-century Genre Paintings

Tekstualia ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 35-52
Author(s):  
Anna Kwiatkowska
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Women Characters ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Old Masters ◽  
Representations Of Women

The goal of the paper is to demonstrate the influence of the Dutch masters on the representation of women in Mansfield’s short stories. The correspondences discernible between Mansfieldian women characters and the women figures from the Dutch Old Masters’ canvases as well as Dutch painters’ techniques dealing with perspective and Mansfield’s treatment of narration show a lot in common. When introducing her female protagonists, Mansfield seems to employ certain narrative strategies that are reminiscent of the techniques utilised by the Old Masters. The paper addresses, therefore, two issues. Firstly, it deals with a transmedial aspect of Mansfield’s stories and makes an inquiry into the question of how the writer endowed her female protagonists with the characteristics that echo the features of women painted by the seventeenth-century artists. And secondly, the paper tries to establish why Mansfield would resort to the Old Masters’ canvases while constructing her modern texts. Since the topic of Dutch influences in Mansfield’s works appears to be a complex one, the paper is but an introduction into a deeper and more thorough inquiry into the works of Katherine Mansfield in relation to the 17th century paintings.

The Political Function of Domestic Objects in the Fiction of Aleksandra Kollontai

Slavic Review ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Birgitta Ingemanson
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
The Political ◽  
New Economic Policy ◽  
The Real ◽  
Political Function ◽  
The Status ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
Status Of Women

During the winter of 1922-1923 when she was just beginning her diplomatic career, Bolshevik activist Aleksandra Kollontai wrote two novels and several short stories that were immediately published in Russia and subsequently combined into two volumes under the titles Liubov’ pchel trudovykh and Zhenshchina na perelome. They were dismissed as mere autobiographical romances, indulging in unhealthy introspection and dangerously divorced from the “real” demands of society. At a time when Soviet Russia was facing enormous challenges connected with the reconstruction after the civil war and with the partial return to a market economy under the New Economic Policy (NEP), Kollontai's focus on domestic relationships and the status of women seemed narrow and excessively private.

At Home Among the Russians: The Short Stories of Olive Garnett and Katherine Mansfield

2017 ◽  
pp. 107-124
Author(s):  
Frances Reading
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Common Interest ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Substantial Part ◽  
Great War ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Russian People ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
At Home

The purpose of this article is to incorporate the little-studied writer, Olive Garnett, into the discussion surrounding Katherine Mansfield in relation to Russian themes. Both Mansfield and Garnett had a common interest in Russia and, writing in the same literary milieu, both wrote short stories about Russia and Russians. Where the interest in Russia comes from for Garnett and Mansfield forms a substantial part of this article. Both were influenced by various Russian radicals and philosophers, such as Nikolai Chernyshevsky who conceivably served to inspire the writing of both women. The context will stem from the ‘Russomania’ that took hold from the 1880s onwards, culminating in the subsequent fin-de-siècle and post-Great War paranoias within the British national consciousness which expressed itself in the form of prejudice towards the foreign Other. It will consider the influence Russia, and Russian people, had on the style and work of Mansfield and Garnett, and in turn reveal how both writers present Russia.

Free Form

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Dufourmantelle
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Free Form ◽  
The Real

We recognize gentleness in the literary figures that turned everything around them upside down without meaning to, including Prince Myshkin, the majority of characters in Kafka, in Melville, in the short stories of Tolstoy, little John Mohune in Moonfleet. These characters arrive from nowhere and with gentleness provoke violence and passion around them. They polarize the real around an unprecedented truth that is impossible to bear. An excess of this gentleness is dangerous because it reveals faults, desire, manipulation, or conversely, goodness.

scholarly journals Across community barriers: female characters in Vimala Devi’s short stories

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. e45888
Author(s):  
Cielo Griselda Festino
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Women Characters ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
Story Cycle ◽  
Story Collection

This article brings a reading of the short-story collection Monção [Monsoon] ( 2003) by the Goan writer Vimala Devi (1932-). The collection can be read as a short-story cycle, a group of stories related by locality, Goa, character, Goans, from all walks of life, and theme, in particular women´s milieu, among other literary categories. In her book, written from her self-imposed exile in Portugal, Devi recreates Goa, former Portuguese colony, in the 1950s, before its annexation to India. A member of the Catholic gentry, Devi portrays the four hundred years of conflictive intimacy between Catholics and Hindus. Our main argument is that Devi´s empathy for her culture becomes even more explicit in Monção when her voice becomes one with that of all her women characters. Though they might be at odds, due to differences of caste, class and religion, Devi makes a point of showing that they are all part of the same cultural identity constantly remade through their own acts of refusal and recognition. This discussion will be framed in terms of Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s theory of autobiography (2001) as well as the studies on Goan women by the Goan critics Propércia Correia Afonso (1928-1931), Maria Aurora Couto (2005) and Fátima da Silva Gracias (2007).

scholarly journals Reconstructing the Mother-Daughter Relationship: Lydia Davis and Amy Tan

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 324-335
Author(s):  
Hala Ewaidat
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
American Education ◽  
Amy Tan ◽  
Mothers And Daughters ◽  
Mother Daughter Relationship ◽  
East And West ◽  
Liberation Movements ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Feminist Work

With four waves of women’s liberation movements in the twentieth century, the relationship between mothers and daughters has come under increasing, frequent, intense, and passionate examination. Scholars East and West have examined this bond, giving it a universal appeal. Among the voices that have come to create speech and meaning to this relationship are. Fouad (1964), the Egyptian writer, in her book Ila Ibnaty (To My Daughter) and Rich’s 1976 classic feminist work, Of Women Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. Concerning their definitions, this paper discusses the oppositional forms of the mother-daughter relationship in Amy Tan’s Two Kinds and Lydia Davis’ The Mother. In both short stories, Tan, with her Chinese traditions and American education, and Davis, whose background includes no ethnic derivations, explore the breakdown in communication in this problematic bond, aiming at reconstructing this richly influential relationship.

scholarly journals METAMORPHOSES OF THE SPACE OF DEATH IN I. FRANKO’S PROSE

2021 ◽  
pp. 5-12
Author(s):  
T. MATVIEIEVA
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
The Real ◽  
Artistic Representation ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Dead Water

The paper proposes a new perspective on the study of I. Franko’s prose works of a wide genre range: the metamorphosis of the space of death as a reflection of the transformations of the psycho-emotional sphere of characters/ The real and imaginary, closed and “endless” spaces of death were identified, their structure, defined as a two-projection, namely, spatial and personal, was analysed. In the collection of “prison short stories”, the method of the paradox is also structured and implemented in the work according to the principle of mirroring: a prison emerges at the same time as a world in itself and a reduced copy of the out-of-prison world. The paper proves the pattern of use for the artistic representation of the death space of the method of gradation – downward potion (from large to smaller locations – prison – annex – carriage – grave) and the ascending when it comes to the possibility of returning from the space of death, recreated with the help of Christian symbols (fish, thorns, water).The conclusion about the parabolic character of I. Franko’s presentation of reality and the person in it is made. The methods of creation of loci are named, they are symbolization, applying of archetypal primers, oppositional character. So, it refers to the symbols of living and dead water, walls, cities, rivers, souls, children; biblical prophecies, parables (the notion of the sin is singled out).A separate aspects of the study is the psycho-emotional states (in particular, agonal) in a border transition situation: stress/apathy, horror/calm. The features of the description of the locations of death are also commented: interior, exterior, various characteristics, symbols, etc.In general, this refers to the transformation into the infernal space of death for most of the characters of the analysed works, either because of the marginality, or because of the subordination to social morality.The only few exceptions are universal parables – examples of the absolute understanding of the meaning of eternal transformation of matter (living/dead and vice versa), spiritual metamorphosis (soul/body –soul/spirit).

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