Male protagonists and their marital situation in Katherine Mansfield's short stories 'The Stranger', 'At The Bay' and 'A Birthday'

[...] Besides, they are in a conflict between a commitment to love and their vivid interest in art. In other stories, such as “The Singing Lesson” (1920/22), “Poison” (1920/24) and “Mr. and Mrs. Dove” (1921/1922) Katherine Mansfield focuses on a more romantic notion of love, presenting both male and female characters experiencing the change between emotional nearness and distance, between the hopes and anxieties of their dreams. Her short stories that are set in Bavaria, such as “A Birthday” (1911), “Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding” (1910) and “The Child-Who-Was-Tired” (1910), deal with marital love and lack this romantic mood. In a rather satirical style she displays an obviously feminist position as she criticizes male dominance and the exploitation of women in marital relationships. After Mansfield married John Middleton Murry in 1918, she writes stories which present her view of marriage – as it appears in “Bliss” (1918), “The Stranger” (1920), Marriage à la Mode” (1921), “The Man Without a Temperament” (1920) and “At the Bay” (1921). These narratives are mainly concerned with the illustration of intimacy and alienation as well as with independence and constraint in marital relations. The following discourse is concerned with the male protagonists in Katherine Mansfield’s short stories “The Stranger”, “At the Bay” and “A Birthday”. It emphasizes intimacy and alienation in marital partnerships as chief characteristics in these short stories. All three stories, either set in Europe or New Zealand, present married couples at a certain stage of human life in unlike contexts. As this discourse is going to reveal each of the three marriages is torn between intimacy and alienation. It emphasizes on the male protagonists and their marital relationship, but necessarily also includes a characterisation of their wives. The three chosen short stories are perfect examples for such an analysis as their married couples have basic elements in common, such as age, social status, family situation and the acceptance of traditional gender-specific role models. Thus their personalities and emotional conflicts to which this discourse directs its principal attention are not essentially distinguished by these aspects. 1 The following paragraph is based on: Dada-Büchel, Marianne. Katherine Mansfield’s Dual Vision: Concepts of Duality and Unity in Her Fictional Work. Andreas Fischer (Hrsg.). Thübingen: francke verlag, 1995. p. 127-128.