A study guide for Katherine Mansfield's "The Doll's House"

By Gale and Cengage

A study guide for Katherine Mansfield's "The Doll's House", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students series. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: May 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535826808

Book preview

10

The Doll's House

Katherine Mansfield

1922

Introduction

Katherine Mansfield's short story The Doll's House shows how rigid social values and class consciousness are handed down from one generation to another. The story takes place in a suburb of Wellington, New Zealand, where the three Burnell sisters receive an extravagant doll's house from one of their parents' wealthy friends. When they start bringing other girls home from school to view this magnificent new toy, jealousies and rivalries arise, as friends compete to prove who is closer to these sudden celebrities. The poorest children at the school, the Kelvey sisters, find themselves excluded from the social circle that forms around the doll's house. Girls mock them in order to raise their own status, and Mrs. Burnell forbids her daughters to allow such low-class people into the yard. The littlest innocent Burnell, Kezia, defies her family by inviting the Kelveys over to look at the doll's house, but their visit opens them up to further abuse and humiliation.

The story is written with Mansfield's characteristic precision, with fully realized characters inhabiting a carefully rendered world. Modern readers will find very little difference between the rules of social exclusion in suburban New Zealand in the 1920s and the same situation anywhere in the world today.

The Doll's House is one of the last stories written by Katherine Mansfield before she died at the age of thirty-four in 1923. It was first published in Athenaeum on February 4, 1922, and then was included in the collection The Dove's Nest and Other Stories, published soon after her death in 1923. It is also available in The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield, published in 2006.

Author Biography

Mansfield was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp on October 14, 1888, in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand. Her father, Harold Beauchamp, was a clerk for an importing firm though he worked his way up over the coming years from one position to the next: he became a partner in the business in 1889, a director of the Bank of New Zealand in 1898, and the chairman of the bank in 1907. Her mother, Annie Burnell Dyer Beauchamp, was constantly ill, having been weakened by rheumatic