Insiders, Outsiders, and Class Theme Analysis

Katherine Mansfield’s The Doll’s House is primarily a tale about how class shapes life in small village. The story revolves around the daughters of two families, the wealthy Burnells and the lower-class Kelveys. As rich insiders, the Burnells do not associate with poor outsiders like the Kelveys. As such, when the young Burnell sisters receive a doll’s house, all the little girls at their school are invited to see it except for the Kelvey sisters, who know better than to expect an invitation. The narrator continually emphasizes barriers both physical and metaphorical between who is “in” and who is “out” to highlight and critique such harsh classism. Mansfield ultimately suggests that class boundaries need not be as rigid as they are and can even be overcome with empathy and kindness.

The characters in The Doll’s House are clearly divided into two groups: the popular, wealthier insiders who are free to associate with one another, and the poor outsiders who are shunned by the rest of society. The Burnells and their friends are definitely “in”: they wear the right clothes, eat the right sandwiches at lunch, and have the right parents. The richest girls in school, the Burnell sisters are at the center of its social life. Since they “set the fashion in all matters of behaviour,” the other girls copy what they do. And because the Burnells are told by their parents not to speak with the Kelveys, all the other little girls avoid them too. Even the school’s teacher follows the Burnells’ lead, using a “special voice”—implied to be condescending or patronizing—to address Lil Kelvey when she brings her “common-looking flowers.”

The impoverished Kelvey sisters, meanwhile, are clearly “out.” They dress in odd scraps and hand-me-downs from the homes of the other girls. Lil wears a dress made from an old green tablecloth from the Burnell house with “red plush sleeves” from the Logans’ curtains.” Her younger sister, Else, wears a dress that is too big for her and a pair of boys’ boots. While the other girls sit together at lunchtime with “thick mutton sandwiches and big slabs of johnny cake spread with butter,” the Kelveys sit apart and eat plain jam sandwiches wrapped in newspaper. Mansfield highlights these class indicators both to demonstrate the triviality of such differences and also to show how they nevertheless make the Kelvey sisters outsiders among their peers.

The story also grammatically separates the Burnells from the Kelveys by referring to the latter using more colloquial, intimate language. Nearly every time Mansfield describes Else, for example, she uses the pronoun “our”: “her little sister, our Else, wore a long white dress,” she writes, and also, “Where Lil went our Else followed.” This encourages the reader to empathize with the sisters and to feel some kind of claim to Else, in particular, as one of their own. Meanwhile, “them” or “their” are often used to describe the Burnells and the other girls, effectively distancing them from the reader. Through language, then, Mansfield simultaneously points out class differences and asks the reader to see past them.

The story further unravels class-based prejudice through Kezia, the youngest Burnell sister who opens the big white gates of her family’s home to allow the Kelveys inside to see the doll’s house. The gates are a symbol of the Burnell’s class superiority, physically separating them from poor outsiders. By opening them, Kezia demonstrates how a strict boundary can be easily broken with a simple act of kindness.

Kezia’s opening of the gates is made all the more powerful by the fact that even acceptable girls are only allowed to enter the courtyard in pairs to see the doll’s house, and not “to come traipsing through the house.” Kezia is the only Burnell to reject such classist thinking. She enjoys swinging on her family’s gates, physically teetering between the inside and the outside of her home—between what she wants to do and what she has been told to do. By showing empathy for the lower class Kelveys, Kezia overcomes the harshness of her peers and society.

Notably, when the Kelveys eventually do see the doll’s house, their experience of it proves no different than that of the other little girls. They gaze on it with the same wonder, and little Else even notices the small lamp that Kezia, too, admires. The story up to this point has depicted how class differences have serious consequences about who gets to experience beauty and friendship, and who does not. Through these final moments, however, Mansfield argues that class distinctions are ultimately petty, unfair, and meaningless.