The Doll's House

In “The Doll’s House,” Mansfield depicts the cruelty of class discrimination inflicted upon two little girls and examines how children learn their behavior from the adults in their lives and soon know their place in the social order. “The Doll’s House,” like many other short stories by Katherine Mansfield, reflects the colonial society of New Zealand, where she was born into and raised by a prominent family in Wellington in 1888. From an early age, she was aware of the strict class distinctions in the British colony that defined the lives of individuals and families in her society; the snobbery of the upper classes and the discrimination that dehumanized members of the lower class deeply disturbed her and became the focus of much of her fiction.