Lil wears a dress made from an old green tablecloth from the Burnell house with “red plush sleeves” from the Logans’ curtains.” Her younger sister, Else, wears a dress that is too big for her and a pair of boys’ boots. The impoverished Kelvey sisters, meanwhile, are clearly “out.” They dress in odd scraps and hand-me-downs from the homes of the other girls. Even the school’s teacher follows the Burnells’ lead, using a “special voice”-implied to be condescending or patronizing-to address Lil Kelvey when she brings her “common-looking flowers.” And because the Burnells are told by their parents not to speak with the Kelveys, all the other little girls avoid them too. Since they “set the fashion in all matters of behaviour,” the other girls copy what they do. The richest girls in school, the Burnell sisters are at the center of its social life. The Burnells and their friends are definitely “in”: they wear the right clothes, eat the right sandwiches at lunch, and have the right parents.
The outsiders house free#
The characters in The Doll’s House are clearly divided into two groups: the popular, wealthier insiders who are free to associate with one another, and the poor outsiders who are shunned by the rest of society. Mansfield ultimately suggests that class boundaries need not be as rigid as they are and can even be overcome with empathy and kindness. The narrator continually emphasizes barriers both physical and metaphorical between who is “in” and who is “out” to highlight and critique such harsh classism. As such, when the young Burnell sisters receive a doll’s house, all the little girls at their school are invited to see it except for the Kelvey sisters, who know better than to expect an invitation. As rich insiders, the Burnells do not associate with poor outsiders like the Kelveys. The story revolves around the daughters of two families, the wealthy Burnells and the lower-class Kelveys. Katherine Mansfield’s The Doll’s House is primarily a tale about how class shapes life in small village.
0 kommentar(er)
