I used to teach Mansfield on an undergraduate module that covered the first half of the twentieth century, having somehow managed not to read her work up until then. Better late than never – the seminars on Mansfield were the ones I used to look forward to most, though I can’t imagine the students got much out of them. It was basically me reading out particular paragraphs and saying: “Isn’t this brilliant? How does she do it?” ‘Bliss’, ‘Daughters of the Late Colonel’ and ‘The Garden Party’ all came in for that treatment, but it’s the final lines of ‘The Doll’s House’ that I still find myself wondering about four years after I last taught it. Having shown it off to everyone else in her class, Kezia Burnell invites two working-class girls, Lil and Else Kelvey, to have a look at much-vaunted doll’s house that’s been gifted to her and her sisters. The house sounds pretty unappealing, though the girls are more than willing to overlook its peculiarities:
There stood the doll’s house, a dark, oily, spinach green, picked out with bright yellow. Its two solid little chimneys, glued on to the roof, were painted red and white, and the door, gleaming with yellow varnish, was like a little slab of toffee. Four windows, real windows, were divided into panes by a broad streak of green. There was actually a tiny porch, too, painted yellow, with big lumps of congealed paint hanging along the edge.
But perfect, perfect little house! Who could possibly mind the smell? It was part of the joy, part of the newness.
It also has “a little lamp”, which we’re assured is “real”. The Kelveys, not considered suitable friends for the Burnell girls, are almost immediately shooed away by the Burnells’ Aunt Beryl. Was the glimpse they got of “the little lamp” a victory, something that will sustain the Kelveys through hard times ahead? Or is this it for them, the summit of experience reached before the age of ten, never to be bettered?
First published in The Nation and Athenaeum, 1922. Collected in The Doves’ Nest and Other Stories, John Middleton Murry, 1923, and then in Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Angela Smith, Oxford, 2008. Available online here
