Societal Frustration and Disillusionment in Katherine Mansfield’s The Collected Stories

statements about “writers” and “backs of chairs” and “chip potatoes” and “frying pans” – just like the coffee machine: simply items of value, but no content. This idea is contrasted with that of the symbol of the “pear tree”. Only Bertha and Miss Fulton go out to see the tree.They stand there and look at the phallic symbol of their growing sexual desire for one another, as it began to “stretch up, to point, to quiver” and “almost touched the rim of the round silver moon”.

And yet, again the real event of sex does not happen as the women are called away, back to the banality of the party and back into the social constraints of their lives. This idea is furthered in Passage Two as Mansfield expresses the frustration of the “boss”, but also his acceptance of the status quo, after his son’s death in the war “six years ago” via an allegory.The “boss” is again a symbolic name, seemingly ironically used here as the boss desires to be the boss, to have controlled his son’s future into the family business, but is in fact not the “boss” at all – his son is the victim of the war of attrition, played out by the generals who conscripted men and sent them off to die. Here again, we see Mansfield’s discontent also, specifically what happened during World War One.

The “boss” is “not feeling the way he wanted to feel” as his feeling of having to have patriotism and salute the dead, but not mourn them, has jaded his value of his son and the relationship they had. He had in fact “planned to

cry”, but cannot. The allegory begins when the fly appears stuck in the blotting paper. There is obvious reference to the trenches of World War One here as the descriptive “broad inkpot” the fly is “trying feebly to clamber out of” invites the reader to envisage the young men at war desperate to escape the “wet and slippery” trenches and crying “Help!Help! ”.

Initially the boss “pulls the small, sodden body up,” this image purveying just how insignificant the boss felt the fly was, reflecting his feelings of what the generals saw his son as, but then as soon as it was able to “drag itself forward” was dropped back in to the metaphorical “ink blot” trench. As the fly dies, the boss calls out colloquial British war cries of: “Look sharp! ” conjuring up disgust in the reader at his lack of insight as to the torture of even the tiny fly.In the final line, the boos “could not remember” what it was he was originally thinking about, similar to the generals of the time forgetting the slaughter, but simply on to the next plan. In Passage Three, Mansfield’s characters of Constantia and Josephine have been dominated by their father in a patriarchal society that has also left them, like the other characters, feeling loss and frustration.

Constantia stares at the Buddha, “wondering”, but this time “her wonder was like longing”. The Buddha, being a symbol of reincarnation, is similar in Bliss to the phoenixes ability to be reborn from its own ashes.Constantia feels loss here, of her past, of her opportunities due to her father’s dominance. The “moon” is utilised again by Mansfield

to represent, as it “made her do it” as well as the “restless water” are symbols to express a woman’s desire to burst out and follow her desires, sexual or otherwise. But Mansfield juxtaposes this heathen image with the Christian image of Jesus being crucified, touching on the guilt Constantia would have felt at these moments she had “lain on the floor… as though she was crucified”.Even the fact she blamed the moon, alludes to an instilled guilt of the old beliefs.

Constantia feels as though her life “all seemed to have happened in a tunnel” (Mansfield was terrified of tunnels and the dark) as though it was all terrifying living under her father’s reign, a world of instruction and demands not questioned, but with his death “she came out of the tunnel into the moonlight” and is able to take control of her own life.The passage ends with the two girls trying to have a conversation, trying to express themselves, but neither can – each prompts the other to do so, as though hoping the other can express what they can’t. But this is not to be as both have “forgotten”. There is, again, an inability to express one’s self in a world where it was never allowed, more directly here with sisters than in the world of Bertha Young.The three passages by Katherine Mansfield reflect the desire that she felt people had to express themselves in a world that frowned upon any expression that did not conform to its ideals. She felt that the middle class were constrained to frippery, the government an unfeeling machine and the old traditions of the patriarchal parenting

system out-dated for the modern times.

The inability to express one’s self in a world that doesn’t allow expression, reflected in frustration, delusion, act of violence and the under-development of personality and spirit.