Provincialism and Pretense Theme Analysis

Based on Mansfield’s own childhood experiences of moving from the New Zealand town of Wellington to the rural village of Karori, The Doll’s House is a critique of small-town vanity. Beyond emphasizing the arbitrary nature of class division, the story also mocks the narrow-minded provincialism of the Burnells—the most distinguished family in a tiny village, outside a small town, on a far-off island in the British Empire. The Doll’s House ultimately points to the desire to appear fashionable and sophisticated—and the pretense and conformity that desire engenders—as the root of much prejudice and cruelty.

This is represented most clearly in the descriptions of the doll’s house itself, which mirrors the Burnell’s country home and social position in their village. The Burnell sisters gain much prestige when they are given the house. All the other little girls cannot stop talking about it and are dying to see it. The doll’s house itself, however, isn’t actually all that impressive. It is “a dark, oily, spinach green” and has “a tiny porch, too, painted yellow, with big lumps of congealed paint hanging along the edge.” While the house does have some extravagant features, it also smells, according to Aunt Beryl, so strongly of paint that it could make someone sick. It is put in the courtyard, “propped up on two wooden boxes beside the feed-room”—not exactly demanding a place of honor in the family’s home. It might be the most wonderful doll’s house in the small village, but, Mansfield implies, to the rest of the world it is an average toy at best.

Similarly, the Burnells may be the richest family around, yet they are ultimately just big fish in a relatively small pond. That the Burnells are not as fashionable and rich as they might like to believe is indicated by the fact that the Burnell sisters must attend school with all the other children in the village, “not at all the kind of place their parents would have chosen.” The narrator describes how “the Judge’s little girls, the doctor’s daughters, the storekeeper’s children, the milkman’s, were forced to mix together” at school, even if the Burnells would rather their daughters have a more elite education.

These other children, in turn, try to seem as much like the Burnells as possible by emphasizing the otherness of the Kelveys. Indeed, the popular girls appear closest and most alike when they are being cruel to Else and Lil. When one of these girls, Lena Logan, insults the Kelveys by screaming “Yah, yer father’s in prison!” at them, the others are so united by this act of meanness that they lose any sense of individuality: “the little girls rushed away in a body, deeply, deeply excited, wild with joy,” Mansfield writes. The need to feel superior engenders an unthinking mob mentality at odds with genuine sophistication. The girls are, in fact, simply conforming to a backwards, decidedly unfashionable mode of thinking.

Mansfield is strongest in her critique of vanity at the end of the story, when Aunt Beryl cruelly shoos the Kelveys away from the doll’s house, treating them “as if they were chickens.” Aunt Beryl yells at them with a voice that is “cold and proud,” yet this action is, in part, to relieve her own stress and anxiety about her relations with a lower-class man called Willie Brent. The narrator does not say much about Willie Brent, or what, in particular, his relation to Aunt Beryl is, though it is likely that he is her lover. Willie writes Aunt Beryl a note that she finds “terrifying,” threatening to come knock on the door if she doesn’t meet him in Pullman’s Bush later that night. That Aunt Beryl finds this notion terrifying suggests her shame in being associated with Willie. She takes out her anger on the Kelveys, which makes “her heart [feel] lighter. The ghastly pressure was gone.” Like the little girls of the town, Aunt Beryl uses her prejudice against the Kelveys to make herself feel better. Through her vain hypocrisy, Mansfield argues that those allegedly more sophisticated or worldly citizens are no better than the lower-classes they define themselves against. On the contrary, the desire to prove one’s social clout is a mark of small-minded vanity.