Abstract
This chapter considers the early stories of Katherine Mansfield and how these stories use colonial New Zealand settings to explore issues of gender, displacement, and the failure of the domestic ideal. The chapter begins with a discussion of Mansfield’s conflicted feelings regarding her native New Zealand and her feelings of hybridity as a British colonial subject. It then moves on to a discussion of three early stories set in New Zealand. “The House” (1912) explores a woman’s wish for a comfortable home for her family, a wish that can only be realized after the woman’s death. In “The Woman at the Store” (1912) and “Millie” (1913), Mansfield moves beyond the spectral to engage with issues of women’s isolation and loneliness in remote dwellings. These women become monstrous doubles of their former selves as they attempt to survive in houses that represent unfulfillment and the women’s distance from society.
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Edmundson, M. (2018). Katherine Mansfield and the Troubled Homes of Colonial New Zealand. In: Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850-1930. Palgrave Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76917-2_11
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