A discussion on Mansfield’s Tragic Theme of her later works

Changchun University of Technology, Changchun 130012, China

^a Corresponding author: guotianbao1999@126.com

Abstract

Katherine, Mansfield is among the very few writers in English to establish a reputation on the basis of short story form. That bringing her fame “Joyce of short stories” should give credit to her later works. Her fictions and her life were tightly interlocked. Just due to her extremely rough experience and vicissitude of life, we can see her revelation or fatalism as well as pessimistic. The First World War left its mark upon her outlook, so like other post-war intellectuals of the “Lost Generation”, her philosophy grew to be one of pessimism and disillusionment in life. Thus she expressed a common western mood—fatalism and tragedy of life in her novels, so Mansfield’s stylistic tragic novel is composed of disillusionment, loneliness. In the following, I try to promulgate her tragic theme by capturing the sense of disillusionment, loneliness in The Garden Party, The Fly.