The Dolls House

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Analyse how the writer of a text you have studied has explored an aspect of human experience The Doll’s House by Katherine Mansfield I believe that Katherine Mansfield has explored the human experience of social discrimination based on class systems. The whole story is about the dividing line. This is a line that works based on discrimination to divide humanity into two groups, the wealthy “haves” and the poor “have nots’”. “The line had to be drawn somewhere.” This is referring to the dividing line, and the somewhere it refers to, was at the Kelveys. The very fact that there was a need for drawing a line that separated those who are acceptable to be seen with and those who are not speaks volumes of the underlying racism, discrimination and injustice that society revolved around was evidently flourishing during this period. Another factor in this adoption into a system where you are not able to be seen with anyone of a lower class then your own is innocence vs experience. The innocence in the short story is Kezia, she has not yet been indoctrinated into the need to believe that one cannot be seen with one outside one’s social rank. Through her views, we see that it is societies fault that those without the same benefits as you were left out, not any particular person, but society. Kezia, as of yet, has not been indoctrinated into the same aspect of class consciousness that has twisted society. Mansfield has managed to beautifully weave Kezia’s outlook of innocence with all those around her, providing the prejudiced, narrow-minded, outlooks of the older, more “experienced” people. While everyone around her attempts to tell her that the Kelveys are not worthy of associating themselves with her, “How dare you ask the little Kelveys into the courtyard?”. Kezia refuses this notion however, bent on living in a world without inequality, without injustice
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