‘Minute Puzzled Explorers’: Children, Affect and Class in Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Doll's House’ and ‘The Garden Party’

This article argues that Katherine Mansfield used the figure of the child to bridge class divides across her oeuvre, particularly in ‘The Doll's House’ (1922) and ‘The Garden Party’ (1922). Unlike middle-class adults, children's heightened sensitivity to direct feeling allows them to form bonds with working-class characters without the need for words, uncovering a common material reality that transcends language and its role in constructing social classes. This dissolution of discursive constructs is reflected in Mansfield's use of silence and ellipses, suggesting a sense of possibility and potentiality beyond the limitations of language. By revealing unspoken connections between children and the working class, this article aims to provide a new perspective on the depiction of the working class in modernist short fiction through the figure of the child.