A Revolution In Perception English Literature Essay

A Revolution In Perception English Literature Essay Speaking of modernist literatures revolutionary project, Maren Linett correctly states that writers had to break with convention and show how life was experienced rather than as it was conventionally recorded.Such a notion is highly relevant in elucidating how writers such as George Egerton and Katherine Mansfield strove, through their revolutionary use of the short story, to expose the failure of the Victorian novel’s dominant male perspective at accurately rendering the reality and ‘terra incognita’ of mothers and wives.   [ 2 ]   This essay will therefore argue that, in Egerton’s ‘A Cross Line’ (1893) and Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ (1918), the use of a ground-breaking female perspective allows them to facilitate the reader’s gaining of ‘new eyes’ on the commonplace subject matter of motherhood and matrimony; a purpose that will be shown to be far more concerned with revolutionizing the Victorian percepti on of these roles as idyllic and harmonious destinations for women, than with creating ‘some new particular thing’.   [ 3 ]   The first half of the essay will consider the ‘new eyes’ that Egerton and Mansfield give to motherhood and will demonstrate that each writer revolutionizes the reader’s perception of maternity by exposing what Nicole Fluhr confirms was the inadequacy of inherited nineteenth-century ideologies and symbols, and also by subverting the eugenic perception of motherhood, meaning highly nurturing or affectionate, provided by their Victorian antecedents.   [ 4 ]   Firstly considering ‘A Cross Line’, I will analyse how Egerton achieves her reversal of Victorian beliefs in an innate maternal instinct through a realist aesthetic and focalized narrative which exposes Gypsy’s repugnant reaction to the bucolic image of the chicks, before demonstrating how this revolutionary perception is reinforced in an aposiope tic statement. Secondly, an examination of ‘Bliss’ and Mansfield’s critical use of the symbolic pear tree will demonstrate that this inherited symbol provides an invaluable framework for exposing Bertha’s aesthetic, rather than eugenic, approach to motherhood that is then explicitly reinforced in her interaction with ‘little B’.   [ 5 ]   The second half of the essay will then move to Egerton’s and Mansfield’s depictions of matrimony, and reveal that each writer adapts this subject to their purpose of providing ‘new eyes’ by revolutionizing two components of the Victorian marriage plot: the elision of female sexuality within marriage, and the predominating perceptions of adultery provided by omniscient narrators in sensation novels.   [ 6 ]   In my analysis of ‘A Cross Line’, I shall illustrate that the psychological moment of Gypsy’s Salomà ©ic dream-vision provides an elucidating frame of reference through which to reassess Egerton’s illustration of the marital union from an unexplored and eroticized female perspective. The final examination of ‘Bliss’ will then demonstrate that Mansfield revolutionizes an omniscient narrator’s perception of the subject matter of infidelious marriage by mediating it through Bertha’s female perspective in two of her psychological moments, which expose its stagnant and adulterous reality as a rejection of the Victorian ideology of marriage as a sacred institution.   [ 7 ]   Ultimately, by appropriating commonplace and eternal subject matter, rather than ‘new particular thing[s]’, within the most appropriate form for exploring and revealing the inner lives of women, Egerton and Mansfield refashion their reader’s normative view of motherhood and marriage and succeed, as Jenny McDonnell confirms, in presenting excellent examples of ‘mak[ing] it new’; in accordance w ith Ezra Pound’s summation of the modernist project.   [ 8 ]