Essay About Katherine Mansfield And Life Of Ma Parker

Katherine Mansfield and SexualityKatherine Mansfield and SexualityOne of the themes that can be found in the stories of Katherine Mansfield centres upon the role, status, sexuality, and “place” of women in society. According to Chantal Cornut-Gentille d’Arcy, “Mansfield’s succinct narratives … are triumphs of style, a style which challenged the conventional parameters of nineteenth-century realism, constrained to plot, sequential development, climax, and conclusion” (244). More specifically, maintains that “even though Mansfield never acknowledged any profound engagement with Freudian approaches to sexuality or psychic disorder … Mansfield moved in a context which undoubtedly indicates she was aware of Freud’s ideas and discoveries” (245).

This is evident in ‘Life of Ma Parker’, which describes the life of a widowed charwoman who has experienced nothing more than tragedy throughout her life and who most recently has had the horrible task of burying her loving little grandson (Lohafer 475). Ma Parker is written by Mansfield from both a Freudian psychological and a sociological perspective. Susan Lohafer characterises the story as “a spare iconography of working-class life that makes the story a perfect set-piece for cultural studies” (475). In the story, an aging charwoman must not only cope with the death of her grandson, she must also deal with the fact that she has no place to go where she can be by herself and give way to her grief.

Nothing that she has achieved in her entire working life has resulted in the acquisition of such a private place. Instead, she has buried her husband, a baker who died of “white lung disease” and those children who survived the high rate of infant mortality fell victim to other ills of the late-Victorian underclass: immigration, prostitution, poor health, worse luck (Lohafer 475).

Ma Parker was a woman whose status in society was predetermined and fixed. Similarly, in Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’, the reader is introduced to another fixed character, Bertha Young. Bertha is a 30-year old wife and mother who is a housewife embodying “the status of non-work” (248). Bertha Young is seen as planning a dinner party and, significantly, as becoming vulnerable to a series of erotic feelings which are first narcissistic, secondly, oriented toward another woman, and finally, erotically pointed at her male spouse. Thomas Dilworth states that in this story, Mansfield explores the homoerotic urge that many women feel but do not give into expressing (141). These urges are presented in the Freudian content as perfectly normal and as liberating.

The protagonist, while dealing with his past he has a few years of experience with, is the first woman to ever develop this compulsion. When she first learns of Mansfield, she is upset and humiliated by the situation:  Her mother’s son is present, a member of the family. Her other childhood friend has died, his body has been burned and his wife has been brutally murdered in retaliation. After killing the man he had planned to get rid of, he has to turn to alcohol for help, and once again, she is shocked. Is she able to escape from the house or become better? She is shown to be quite strong, is at the peak of her capacity to be the mother of a young child, and that she has been able to bring her past to light.

In the story the viewer is introduced to a series of feelings he had about her, to which she can relate. In the story the viewer is then shown to be able to go and explore her past. These experiences are often a struggle for the viewer, but they are equally pleasurable for the viewer as they are for other feelings that are in fact part of her being. In a second relationship, she struggles with a difficult social situation that confronts the group, but does not suffer from this disorder. In this third relationship that is revealed, however, the viewer is reminded of those who were present during the past time between the last encounter with Mansfield and that were the victims of this traumatic time. In this fourth interaction, she is shown to have turned into an addict herself:  Her relationship with the man she met in childhood had become an addiction.

In the story the reader is offered an alternative narrative and has the opportunity to explore the possibility of the past and to uncover the meaning of the present and past. The novel takes the reader outside of her own current set of constraints and explores a sense of the past in the context of this transition. In this way, the novel introduces the reader to a deeper and wider array of issues that are ultimately more personal but also more deeply personal in character.

The novel is an engaging novel, with an emphasis on the personal, in-depth narratives and the ability for the reader to come to grips with them in her personal life. It engages with some of the many issues that were explored in the book, but also explores these issues for some additional emotional and emotional themes in the story. To illustrate the challenges inherent in the novel, the narrator examines the characters of Men in Pink and of Men in Red, as well as the family in Blondia.

The book was published April 2016 by Tarrant-Collins. This cover, an original hand drawing, was reproduced at www.bruchreich.com.

However, Mansfield is seen by Dilworth as stopping before allowing her protagonist to become overly involved in these lesbian longings (142). It is no accident that Bertha Young shifts her desire from the female object, Miss Fulton, to the more legitimate object of her own husband. It is at this juncture that Mansfield makes it clear to the reader that Mr. Young and Miss Fulton are likely to be engaged in an affair of their own: as she is departing from the dinner party, he tells her she is adored and they arrange to meet “To-morrow” (Mansfield 185). For Bertha, who is clearly in the midst of a sexual awakening of some importance,