28 pages • 56 minutes read
Katherine MansfieldThe Doll's House
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1922A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Doll’s House
The titular doll’s house serves as the central symbol of the narrative. Its entrance into the lives of the Burnells and their friends disrupts and reinforces the social hierarchy. Through the doll’s house, Mansfield examines the themes of Female Friendship and Child Agency, Social Divisions in the Adult World, and The Politics of Children.
The doll’s house is introduced with an ambiguous blend of descriptors, showing how from the children’s point of view, it appears miraculously colorful and fascinating, while adults reveal that it is not the pristine icon that the children believe it to be. Pat uses a knife to open it, and Aunt Beryl notes that it smells unpleasant. Though a mere object, it holds considerable power for the children and crashes into their small, contained world.
Female friendship requires currency, and Isabel’s granting access to selected friends determines who holds power and desirability. Though the house attracts every girl no matter her social class, the closeness to the house that may be achieved is an immovable metric of worth. While children often perceive themselves as powerless, the doll’s house allows them to exert political control on the playground.
While the house reflects social hierarchies, it also embodies a dismissal of those hierarches. For example, Isabel prefers to view herself as a dictator, but Kezia uses the doll’s house as an opportunity for diplomacy. She extends kindness toward the Kelvey sisters while her peers extend cruelty. Like Else, Kezia is fascinated by the little lamp. This preoccupation reflects her nascent understanding of social boundaries—and her small acts against those strictures.
Clothing
Clothing holds considerable social capital, functioning as both a means of self-expression and as projecting one’s financial status. Through the motif of clothing worn by the Burnell and Kelvey children, Mansfield examines the themes of Social Divisions in the Adult Word and The Politics of Children.
The Kelveys’ unconventional hand-me-down clothing makes them a target for their classmates. Lil wears “a dress made from a green art-serge table-cloth of the Burnells’, with red plush sleeves from the Logans’ curtains” (6). Her hat, which used to belong to the postmistress, “was turned up at the back and trimmed with a large scarlet quill,” which makes her look like “a little guy” (6). Here, Lil is made up of her classmates’ leftovers, and her femininity is questioned as a result. Likewise, Else wears “a long white dress, rather like a nightgown, and a pair of little boy's boots,” which adds to her appearance of “a little white owl” (6). Wearing nightclothes to school implies impropriety, and her boy's boots emphasize that she is also not measuring up to gendered expectations. Else does not speak very often, preferring to communicate in front of others by tugging on the back of her sister’s skirt. The sisters’ clothes emphasize their difference from their peers. Their clothes do not conform to gendered guidelines and emphasize the sisters’ animalistic qualities, which are frequently noted.
Sisterhood
The motif of sisterhood demonstrates the precarious standards of girlhood, femininity, and womanhood within this text. Through an examination of this motif, Mansfield considers the themes of Female Friendship and Child Agency, Social Divisions in the Adult World, and The Politics of Children.
Sisterhood can be both “inherited” and “acquired,” biologically determined or socially cultivated. The female child characters are introduced in pairs and groups: Isabel, Lottie, and Kezia Burnell; Lil and Else Kelvey; Emmie Cole and Lena Logan. Even Mrs. Burnell and Aunt Beryl may be presumed to be sisters or sisters-in-law. Within the text, female characters do not exist on their own; they have powerful biological or social ties to at least one other female character.
This innate sense of pairing and grouping automatically invites the reader to associate with a pair or group, and while the relatively-objective narrator does not pass moral judgment, the text evokes pathos for Else and Lil. Else is called “our Else” 15 times throughout the text, which emphasizes the reader’s sense of solidarity with the Kelvey sisters. With this, sisterhood offers a form of protection, alliances, and solidarity.
Related Titles
By Katherine Mansfield
