Life in the Margins: Minor Characters in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: Many of Mansfield’s stories are lauded for their layered depictions of major characters’ interiority. As central as these are to her work and her exploration of character, this focus only on perspective characters can minimize the importance of minor characters in her more crowded stories like “At the Bay,” “Bliss,” and “The Garden Party.” These characters, despite their places in the margins of their stories, fill a large part of these stories’ character-systems and play off of one another and off of the major characters to create a complex web of meaning that enhances and adds to the many interpretations that the stories offer. They are also a ground for modernist experimentation as much as plot or structure are, and Mansfield uses them to explore and discover new roles for minorness in fiction. The women Mansfield wrote about resembled her in many ways, and she drew on her own experience as a marginalized writer to depict them. This marginalization also contributed to the long-standing perception of her as a minor writer, pushed aside in the narrative of the development of literary modernism just as the (often marginalized) minor characters are in her stories. Yet Mansfield’s minor characters are not solely defined by their minorness, instead presenting avenues for exploration of sexuality, class, colonialism, and gender.

Author	DeVito, Arielle
Thesis advisor	Stavely, Alice
Thesis advisor	McGurl, Mark
Degree granting institution	Stanford University
Department	Department of English

Subject	minor character
Subject	Character
Subject	Women in literature
Subject	queer women in literature
Subject	Marginality, Social, in literature
Subject	Short story
Subject	Short stories, English
Subject	Queer theory
Subject	British colonies
Subject	New Zealand
Subject	Mansfield, Katherine, 1888-1923
Subject	Short stories (Mansfield, Katherine)
Genre	Text
Genre	Thesis

DOI	https://doi.org/10.25740/mm463rk2016
Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/mm463rk2016

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License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-SA).

Preferred citation: DeVito, A. (2022). Life in the Margins: Minor Characters in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/mm463rk2016

Stanford University, Department of English, Undergraduate Honors Theses

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