Katherine Mansfield & the Trauma of Fractured Intimate Bonds

In “Loneliness,” [1910] as in most of her writings, Katherine Mansfield voices out the darkness and coldness of her nights, because of an extreme feeling of loneliness; thus the silence of life. A great degree of sorrow is explicitly expressed hroughout her short story writing journey in which she expresses her estrangement towards life and agony due to her loneliness and permanent hanger for love. With an impressionistic style, polished satire, and an explicit feminist tone, Katherine Mansfield’s characters debate the human existence within the barriers of emptiness and affliction, usually resulted in alienated disproportioned grotesques who are struggling for survival. They are neither alive nor dead. In this context, this paper highlights Mansfield’s representation of traumatic love in male-female relationships. The main focus is on the painful love politics that characterize couples’ lives inside and outside the marital institution, and the way they shape and reshape the modern human experience. Through questioning Mansfield’s incongruous couples’ interactions, the paper envisions the couple’s life question in relation to men and women’s conceptualisations of love that abide by their <i>advanced civilised </i>past, present, and future, amid dark shadows of beginnings and endings which shape its psychological and social poisoning features. The scrutiny portrays the painful life of Katherine Mansfield’s lost miserable characters who endure hollowness and emotional withdrawal, suggesting a comparative study of “Mr Reginald Peacock’s Day,” [1917] “Poison” [1920] and “A Married Man’s Story” [1923] written by Katherine Mansfield.