Linda Burnell: Wife, mother, individual. In this passage, we see Mansfields recurring theme of the apparent futility of womens lives through the portrayal of Linda Burnell,

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Linda Burnell: Wife, mother, individual.

In this passage, we see Mansfield’s recurring theme of the apparent futility of women’s lives through the portrayal of Linda Burnell, the mother of the family, shown to us by the extensive use of her stream of consciousness.  Mansfield also uses this chapter to present Linda’s relationship with the male sex and, more specifically, with her husband, Stanley.

        Linda is in the garden and ‘dreams the morning away’ – through this, Mansfield presents to us her apparent aimlessness and disinterest in the activities presented to her by life. The scene and place is set first by a large chunk of description of the garden where Linda is lying in her steamer chair. Mansfield uses similes such as ‘Each [...] petal shone as if each was the careful work of a loving hand’ to add interest to the description and create correlations between the idea of beauty and work; that things can be beautiful and take time but that ultimately, nothing will last forever or hold any real weight at the end of the day. This leads us to the internal conflict of Linda as she comes to terms with how little ‘meaning’ her life has; she questions ‘Why, then, flower at all?’ Flowering being the sexual reproduction of plants, we see the parallels between Linda’s unwanted children and these wasted flowers. This introduces Mansfield’s trademark objective correlative as she incites the reader to question the waste of effort for something lovely but temporary.

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        Relishing some moments alone, Linda strolls through the garden and appears to take time out from the responsibilities life has presented to her. We see again the use of symbolism as Mansfield compares her children and the flowers in the garden; Linda berates having no time to enjoy the flowers as ‘along came Life and one was swept away’. This could be a direct nod towards Linda being hurried with her children and thus having no time to ‘part the petals, to discover the under-side of the leaf.’ However, with her girls old enough to look after themselves, she appears ...

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