Modernist short stories have often been described as psychological sketches. The expression underlines two things of paramount importance in modernist short stories and modernist fiction at large. First, modernist writers aimed to do away with plot and action, with a conventional narrative form, whether in the novels or in the shorts stories. Second, they wanted to convey a character's "impressions" through the use of narrative voice, what became known as the stream of consciousness. Formally speaking, this translated into an extensive use of free indirect speech as well as a superimposition of different narrative frames structuring the text in lieu of the traditional plot structure. Another distinctive feature of the modernist text, which is the consequence or maybe the cause of this focus on a character's inner life, is how it consistently lays bare the social semblances. Modernist stories are most often set in highly coded realist social contexts (dinner parties, family gatherings, school lessons, etc) and the drama - there is indeed a characteristic theatricality to Mansfield's texts that may be found in other modernist texts as well - that is played out is that of the collapse of a society's ideals that is transcribed into a character's social inadequacy to conventions or his/her utter failure to play by the rules hence the defeat of his/her preconceptions. This corresponds to what the modernists themselves have theorized as a moment of epiphany. Joyce made the term popular and each of the short stories in his collection Dubliners was designed to contain such a moment of revelation experienced either by the character or by the reader. The description of what Joyce intended with his epiphanies by his brother Stanislaus underlines this process of laying bare which some critics have compared to the disclosure of a character's symptom: "little errors and gestures - mere straws in the wind - by which people betrayed the very things they were most careful to conceal." Joyce's own description in Stephen Hero insists on how an object is suddenly stripped to its essentiality: "Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance." Other modernist writers such as James, Conrad, Woolf or Lawrence appropriated the notion in their own ways. Woolf wrote about "moments of being" while Lawrence evoked a "flame into being", both insisting on a particular state of being that is consistent with the modernist focus on the inner life. Mansfield herself wrote about "one blazing moment", taking up the idea, similar to that of Lawrence, of an illuminating moment. Short stories are particularly apt to convey epiphanic moments as the form relies on condensation. Katherine Mansfield wrote short stories exclusively and produced a large body of work though she died quite young from tuberculosis when she was 30. She is one the best representatives of modernist short story writing. Virginia Woolf herself admitted to Mansfield that she was jealous of her writing: "and then Morgan Foster said the Prelude and The Voyage Out were the best novels of their time, and I said damn Katherine! Why can't I be the only woman who knows how to write?"Mansfield has since been noted as an innovator of the short story form as Andrew Gurr and Clare Hanson have pointed out, underlining in particular her skillful use of free indirect speech: "Katherine Mansfield's development of free indirect form was one of her most important contributions to the art of the short story. Such a form allows for directness and immediacy, enabling the intrusive presence of the author-as-narrator to appear to disappear from the text." Thus the multiplicity of narrative voices and consequently of narrative frames which cast different lights on the same story is a characteristic of Mansfield's writing and help account for the double-sided nature of her stories as they usually read both as enchanting and fiercely ironical. Taking a look at the different uses of voice in Mansfield's stories will help better understand how to read them.
