‘Forlorn on the Fringe of Life’: Exploring Working-Class Childhood in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories

In Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘Life of Ma Parker’, the old, widowed charwoman is plagued by ‘unbearable’ thoughts of her deceased grandson Lennie: ‘Why did he have to suffer so?’ Lennie’s unfortunate death in the story is not a solitary instance of tragic portrayal of working-class childhood in Mansfield’s short fiction. In several of her tales she empathetically explores the marginalized existence of such children, occasionally juxtaposing their deplorable existence with their elite counterparts’. From social exclusion, child labour, parental rejection, infant and child mortality on the one hand to physical and verbal abuse, bullying in the school and appalling living conditions on the other; Mansfield's exploration of the working-class childhood in her short fiction is not only psychologically complex but sociologically significant. Focusing on the relevant short stories in her oeuvre, this brief analysis intends to closely examine such depictions of marginalized childhood experiences, particularly in light of the oppressive societal conditions that validate their repressive alienation and sufferings. Tracing various biographical circumstances that may have fostered Mansfield’s deep empathy with the children’s’ predicament, this analysis also draws attention to her subtle oblique narrative strategies that effectively represent the plight of working-class children in a convincing and an ingeniously nuanced manner.

Seconds Last

What does it mean to be dead? If you were living in a perfect, but false, moment in time, would you choose to leave it? In this work of philosophical short fiction, Linus and Axel are sitting in Central Park on a perfect October day. They have lived in this same day, seemingly, forever. They know they are both dead. Linus died about ten years later than Axel. It occurs to Linus that if they are both seeing his vision of Central Park, it must be his reality. Linus theorizes that, at the moment of death, our brain activity speeds up dramatically, making it seem like our final moment in time lasts forever. However, it’s not real. Linus decides to end this moment in time and move on.

Pneumadectomy

What if there was absolute proof of the soul? Would you ever have yours removed? Would you be friends with someone who had had it removed? In this work of philosophical short fiction, science has definitively discovered that your soul resides in your appendix. Sometimes, when your appendix is having issues, it is for medical reasons. However, sometimes it is because your soul, residing in your appendix, is having issues. The solution in either case is the same, remove the organ. Rolly is a young boy, like all other young boys, who likes to play with is friends. However, his appendix was inflamed and had to be removed. Now, the other children call him “No Soul” and refuse to play with him. Feeling left out, he goes to a neighbor’s house to visit another friend Cioran. However, Cioran’s parents are far more religious and, when their child had appendix issues, they refused to have it removed as they didn’t want to remove his soul. Because his appendix was not removed Cioran, unlike Rolly, died.

5. The plot thickens…and thins

‘The plot thickens…and thins’ describes the changing status of plot in the genre. For much of the 19th century, anecdote and incident inspired short fiction written for a mass market. The incident or anecdote-based short story made a virtue of brevity, and the economy of style and consequential arrangement of causes and effects well suited slice-of-life episodes, whodunits, and ghost stories. What these modes all share is a skill in building up suspense. Yet the genre has been enjoying a long postmodernist reincarnation in which it has adopted almost the opposite approach. Losing the plot has been a source of fictional experimentation and liberation from linearity. Repetition with subtle variation has become a key structure.

Philological analysis of the text: reception of I. A. Bunin's short fiction “The Epitaph”

The object of this research is Ivan Bunin’s prose of the early period – “The Epitaph”. I. A. Bunin is a Neorealist writer of the turn of the XIX – XX centuries, publicist, a unique representative of the white émigré. The subject of this research is the reception of “The Epitaph” by modern audience based on the command of philological text analysis. Having analyzed the traditional semantic components of the literary text (that are part of the concept of “philological text analysis”), the authors offer modern approaches towards representation of the established semantic categories of the text, demonstrate their functionality on the linguistic level, analyze the methods of their lexical representation and verbalization, which determines the novelty of this article. The goal lies in philological analysis of I. A. Bunin's short fiction “The Epitaph”, taking into account the historical-cultural context of its creation, the role of extralinguistic factors in the text, and their reflection on the linguistic level, semantics of the title and keywords in the ideological-thematic content of the work and expression of the authorial position. Alongside the traditional methods of academic philology, such as historical-cultural, biographical, commentary reading, linguistic-stylistic analysis, the research employs the techniques of cognitive linguistics. This article is first to describe the experience of a commentary reading of I. A. Bunin's short fiction “The Epitaph”, which is based on cognition of the semantic components of the work through the prism of a linguostylistic approach within the framework of philological analysis. The authors reveal techniques of reading the text, placing emphasis on the lexical means of representation of the key semantic categories, which on the one hand reflect the writer’s worldview , while on the other – form his individual writing style. Such articulation of the problem determines the prospects for the study of other proses of I. A. Bunin.