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1.1 Background of This Study
Katherine Mansfield was a prominent modernist writer of short stories who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand. When she was 19, Mansfield left New Zealand and settled in the United Kingdom. In 1917 she was diagnosed with extrapulmonary tuberculosis, which led to her death at the age of 34.
“The Garden Party”, which Mansfield wrote during her final stages of illness, has been considered the peak of her achievements. Alpers (1980) once said “The Garden Party” is based on Mansfield’s real life. Its luxurious setting is also based on Mansfield’s childhood home at Tinakori Road, Wellington. Therefore, the writing background of “The Garden Party” has helped lay the foundation for the symbolic feature of the story.
1.2 Previous Studies on Katherine Mansfield and Her Works
1.2.1 Studies Abroad
Though western scholars have already made researches and comments about Mansfield and her works since 1910, they hold different opinions and emphasis. Some scholars have studied Mansfield’s writing styles. At the beginning of Mansfield’s writing, many scholars didn’t approve of her works, but they did find some relations between her writing styles and Chekhov. As is known to all, one of Chekhov’s narrative techniques is symbolism. So, Katherine Mansfield was more or less influenced by his writing style. Pamela Dunbar mentioned in her Radical Mansfield: Double Discourse in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories (1997: 65) that “many of Mansfield’s works use abundant implications and symbols to reveal its potential stream of consciousness”. Besides, some experts have tried to study Katherine Mansfield’s writing backgrounds.
Katherine Mansfield is a controversial writer in the literary world because of her special identity. She was born in New Zealand, and most of her famous works are based on the childhood life in New Zealand, which brought her great literary reputation in England. Many famous literary critics such as Antony Alpers and Ian A. Gordon have made great contributions to the study of Mansfield’s works. They emphasized her New Zealand native complex and family background’s influence on her writings. Representative works include: The Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield by Antony Alpers (1984) and Katherine Mansfield and her confessional stories by C. A Hankin.(1983) In the 1980s, Mansfield’s reputation increased greatly, so scholars tried to make biographical researches about her life, letters, literary activities and works. Some even tried to study her works by combining them with other subjects, such as sociology, psychology and aesthetics. Pamela Dunbar (1997) studied Mansfield’s works from the perspective of psychology and sociology and considered her works as psychological stories which reveal the abnormal and irrational state of human psychology.