Mansfield with Monsters by Katherine Mansfield

An early story, “In a Café,” portrays a youthful “new woman” and her male acquaintance, a musician.

Mansfield’s stories often evoke the complexities of the conversational give-and-take between women and men and the unexpected courses that passion can take. She can be witty if she chooses, but more often her stories provide arresting descriptions and startling metaphors, which evoke shifting states of happiness, yearning, or despair. Her stories are economical, edited so that there is usually not one unnecessary or insignificant word. Often her stories are designed, by means of quick changes in time and by surprise turns, to lead the reader to unexpected moments of illumination or epiphanies. The action of Mansfield’s stories (again, like Chekhov’s) does not surge powerfully forward. This essay suggests some of the ways these stories may be read. If a story appears to point in many directions, not all of which are logically consistent, that is the way Mansfield feels the whole truth is most honestly communicated. It is vital for readers to understand that Mansfield (like Chekhov, to whom she is often compared) does not conceal a hidden “message” in her stories. Moreover, she uses dialogue and indirect speech extensively, and she does not often seem to speak directly in her own voice the reader is not sure exactly who is speaking. Her exact meanings are not so easily pinned down, for her tone is complex: She mixes witty satire and shattering emotional reversals. In 1918, she set herself the tasks of communicating the exhilarating delicacy and peacefulness of the world’s beauty and also of crying out against “corruption.” A reader will soon make his or her own list of themes: the yearnings, complexities, and misunderstandings of love loneliness, particularly of independent women the superficiality of much of modern life the erosions of time and forgetfulness the beauty and indifferent power of the natural world, especially plant life and the sea.

Katherine Mansfield’s ( 14 October 1888 – 9 January 1923) themes are not hard to discover. Analysis of Katherine Mansfield’s Stories

Mansfield with Monsters by Katherine Mansfield