Female Characters In Mansfield's The Woman At The Store

This story features a female protagonist which challenges the prevailing literary tradition of her time in which females were relegated in favour of men. In this short story she demonstrates a determination to move away from narrative forms dominated by the all-wise exclusively male, writers of previous generations and to write in a way that represents the feelings and responses of her characters. She challenges the habit of presenting narrative fiction through male eyes and according to male values. By placing her female characters at the front position of her stories, as subject matter or narrator, Mansfield forces the reader to sympathize with her characters perspectives. However, although Mansfield’s female protagonists confront the conventions of patriarchal literature, she does not disagree with her contemporaries in the most obvious ways. Through the use of modernist method in her writing, Mansfield challenges the status quo and replaces its stern guidelines with her own idealised notion of female roles in literature.

The Woman at the Store reveals the use of paradox since it presents the concurrence of a woman whose prospects for her future life emerges to be attractive and alluring but in reality is the different because she suffers abuse from her husband, and is alone on the ranch where they lived. Another man who comes with whom the woman takes up to tone down the seclusion on the ranch is unaware of the violence. He doesn’t know that she has murdered her