Dill Pickle analyse

A dill pickle is a short story which show us a meeting between a man and a woman. We will show How does the author, namely Katherine Mansfield, manage to show, from the very beginning, that this serendipitous meeting can only be an abortive meeting ? Indeed , we can already see that the two characters are two opposites. The man is really self-centred : He is always talking about himself and he wants to show that he does and has done everything better than the others. He is also cruel : He enjoys showing he has got a lot of money. But the woman, who is called Vera is very sensitive to others and also sensitive to beauty and art she has had a very good artistic education : she can play THE piano. So the two main characters are two opposites . But this short story does not only show the meeting of two people. As a modernist short story it shows everyday life ; there is no plot. The author with this short story wants to denounce the superiority of man in the society at the time; Indeed katherine mansfield is a feminist writer , we can suppose that she inspires from herself to denounce this fact .This short story promotes champions feminism short story , it remain us the spirit of the time thanks to The use of literary techniques such as free indirect speech plus an early version of stream of consciousness to show that she listens to him who is always interrupting her and always speaking to show the opposition between a male talker and a forced female listener.It’s like an inverted Scheherazade (imprisoned on his magic carpet from the 1001 nights ) who is supposed to listen and not to talk …. This allusion to Scheherazade is called : Intertextuality , it remains us another story ; and this story is also a story of an impossible love. To conclude : a dill pickle is a modernist short story which is a reflection of the spirit of the time inasmuch as it is a pretext to denounce male chauvinist and promote feminism through a female's victimisation at the time of WWI which will trigger off the 1st stage of women's emancipation

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