Patriarchal family systems in the stories of Katherine Mansfield and Zhang Ailing

Abstract

Katherine Mansfield and Zhang Ailing are known as writers of short stories in which they observed the dynamics of family interaction in societies undergoing radical social change. Mansfield portrayed New Zealand and European (mostly British) families in the (post-)Victorian age and the First World War while Zhang depicted Chinese families in the periods of the fall of the Qing Empire and the May Fourth Movement. Both writers noted the transformations which the traditional patriarchal family of their respective cultures underwent in context of these changes, but as skeptical and pessimistic women, they showed how little improvement resulted not only for women, but also for men. Current scholarship on both writers mostly focuses on autobiographical elements and aesthetic issues to reflect their modemist style and narrative techniques. This thesis takes a new approach which focuses on the way that these two writers understood the family as a system. It shows how both writers instinctively, intuitively and independently understood the family systems perspective, anticipating what would later be theorized by family therapists in the 1950s. Their stories depict families not so much as collections of individuals, but as homeostatic structures. This study further reveals the remarkable commonalities of experience, insight and literary praxis shared by these two writers and the insights that the work of each brings to that of the other in a comparative study. In their stories, as in family systems theory, individual (subsystem), family (system), and society (megasystem) form a complex three-tiered feedback habitat. Though both writers believe family members are individuals first, it is a belief they are pessimistic about. Imprisoned and impaired by their (gendered) cultural roles, their fictional family members fail to play interpersonal roles to care for each other. Emotional bonding in the family is difficult and the family becomes the site for suffering.