Dual Narrative Dynamics and the Critique of Privilege

Dan Shen's work on the stories of Katherine Mansfield, particularly "Revelations," suggests the efficacy of dual narrative dynamics for approaching literary texts that critique privileged women protagonists. In some such texts, an accompanying critique of the patriarchal system that guarantees the race and class privilege of wealthy white women even as it limits them on the basis of gender is sometimes clearly in evidence. In other such texts, however, the systemic critique is obscured, posing for literature scholars problems that Shen's model helps to address. In this response, I put my work on the complexities of plot in the service of Shen's work on dual progression to suggest the applicability of her model to critiques of privilege. In doing so, I address the question of how what Shen terms a "covert progression," which is grounded in textual evidence, can be hidden from careful readers. I argue that, in texts like "Revelations," authors construct a particular relation between negative ethical judgments and empathetic affective responses that effectively keeps the critique of patriarchy in the background.

Mansfield takes a risk in "Revelations" by consistently thwarting the authorial audience's empathy for a protagonist who draws our strongly negative ethical judgment. Judgment without empathy discourages readers from seeking the systemic causes of the protagonist's suffering, leaving the covert progression hidden. In contrast, narratives that engage both judgment of and empathy for wealthy, white women of leisure tend to integrate critiques of the privileged protagonist and the patriarchal system that guarantees that privilege. For example, Virginia Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway has accepted the costs of the kind of stable marriage Monica Tyrell contemplates, and, reminiscent of Monica, finds it "outrageous to be interrupted at eleven o'clock on the morning of the day she was giving a party" (40). Unlike Mansfield, however, Woolf keeps the reader's empathy for and judgment of Clarissa in balance, and, partly as a result, her critique of Clarissa's privilege in no way obscures her critique of the system that renders her "Mrs. Dalloway." Edith Wharton's Lily Bart, like Monica Tyrell, makes a goal of attracting wealthy men she cannot respect or love, and she imagines, briefly and ineffectually, freedom from the necessity of conforming to feminine norms and committing to an unfulfilling marriage. We judge Lily for her complicity with the system that demands this of her, but, because she cannot bring herself to accept the things she has worked for, and because she performs admirable acts against her own interests, our empathy is consistently engaged. The factors that encourage our empathy direct our attention to the systemic basis of her suffering.

When authors construct narratives that refuse readers' empathy and endorse only our negative judgment, the larger systemic critique can be eclipsed by the critique of the privileged protagonist. Shen finds that most scholarship on "Revelations" focuses on the story's critique of a wealthy, leisured protagonist characterized by "neurosis" and "weakness" ("Covert" 8; "Subverting" 191–92). Shen demonstrates that this overt plot is underlain by a covert progression that critiques the patriarchal forces that render Monica a "doll" ("Covert" 8). She cites salient textual evidence to support her case, raising the question of why this textual evidence has not led other scholars to the covert progression. I suggest that the overt plot is more complex than it appears at first, juxtaposing the weakness of Monica's position with evidence of her power and the ways she does and does not make use of it. The resulting readerly dynamics draw our judgment on Monica's privilege while obscuring the critique of patriarchy.

The tension between Monica's weakness and her power first appears in the story's second sentence. After learning that Monica spends hours every morning suffering "so terribly" from "her nerves," we are told, "It was not as though she could control them" (262). As Shen explains, our judgment and our empathy are at odds from the first sentence, in which we learn of Monica's suffering but are also alerted, by Mansfield's use of free indirect discourse, to the...