However, not possessing the traditional male capacity of active knowledge and action, such individuals dwell submissively in the constrained space of the distilled form of the short story. Such desire is manifested in intersexual symbolism expressing female desire to possess both male and female reproductive organs. Mansfield’s women seek to both overthrow and become independent from the male. These women, their outer selves in conflict with their inner desires, seem to perform the role of the female whilst an external narrator dictates their movements in directorial fashion.
Their inner thoughts are dictated by an external figure through the author’s free indirect discourse. They do not engage in subjective experience and seem to have ‘forgotten themselves’. Formulating a general world-view of the female, Mansfield reveals the suffering of the female’s unresolved issues of division between the rational and the physical. In her modernist short fiction, Katherine Mansfield explores Virginia Woolf’s notion that “women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems”. Highly Commended at Undergraduate Awards 2013.
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