Katherine Mansfield's Suburban Fairy Tale Gothic

Abstract

Explorations of ways in which literary modernists use the Gothic only rarely consider the work of Katherine Mansfield among other women writers of the period. However, Mansfield's stories often use defamiliarisation, a popular feature of the Gothic which moves readers through estrangement to see situations and people anew. Mansfield's use of the Gothic can be seen to expose and explore social relationships and states of being, and do so using a rich mixture of narrative formulae and techniques, influenced by fairy tales and myth. This essay considers such techniques in a range of Mansfield's short stories and poems, before focusing on the story ‘A Suburban Fairy Tale’, which builds on the traditional tale of the changeling to expose selfishness, hypocrisy, suburban complacencies, self-deception and culpable child neglect.