The Interrelatedness Of Character and Nature In Katherine Mansfield’s “prelude”

Abstract

Katherine Mansfield’s contribution to the development of short story genre is related to her use of nature imagery, through which the characters are revealed. Many of her stories use the garden as setting and dwell on the difference between the outer and inner space, focusing specifically on the experience of female characters. In her short story “Prelude”, which recounts the story of the Burnell family’s move from town to a new house with a garden in the country, Mansfield emphasizes the interrelatedness of character and nature. Through the juxtaposition of wild nature with nature created by human beings, particularly the garden and the aloe tree in this story, she shows the inner states of her characters as well as the different relationships between the individual and the place s/he lives in. Ecofeminism, which correlates issues of nature and environment to the situation of women, emphasizes that characters cannot be thought in isolation from their physical surroundings. Hence, in this paper I will analyze Mansfield’s story “Prelude” from an ecofeminist perspective by highlighting the analogy between nature/woman and culture/man to show how the writer puts more emphasis on the former of the dualisms through the valorization of women and nature.