The Postmodern Katherine Mansfield : Beyond the Self of Modernism In “ The Garden - Party ”

Katherine Mansfield is traditionally located in English Modernism; however, she goes beyond the modernist perception of the “allotropic self” and approaches the endlessly split subject of postmodernism. This study selects the theoretical rationale of a number of postmodernist critics that validates a perception of Mansfield’s treatment of the human subject as postmodernist, particularly in “The Garden-Party.” Dennis Brown and Eric Mark Krame distinguish between modernism, as a platonic or monolithic movement that traces an essential identity beyond social chaos, and postmodernism, as a “heraclitan” and radically plural trend that ends up in an eternally split subject never to be systematized. Hence, this article departs from several postmodernist concepts to prove that Mansfield’s narrative differs from traditional modernism in its closeness to these theoretical presuppositions that she preceded by several decades.