An Analysis of The Doll’s House by Katherine Mansfield

In the short story ‘The Doll’s House’ by Katherine Mansfield, a main idea that was dealt with was the discrimination of the higher class citizens towards the less fortunate people in the society. This issue was mainly shown through two contrasting families: the Burnells and the Kelveys. By using Freudian analysis, we can closely examine the characters regarding this issue in the text.
Sigmund Freud states that the human mind is made up of three parts: the id which represents our unconscious or repressed thoughts, urges and desires, the superego – which represents our learned knowledge about what is right and wrong at any given situation, and lastly, the ego, which constantly chooses between the conflicting desires of the id and the superego.
In the story, the three Burnell children- Isabel, Lottie and Kezia, are given a doll’s house by Mrs Hay, who had come to stay with them. At school, they show off their new doll house to the other girls excluding the Kelvey sisters and this is where we first see the children’s attitudes towards them. The Kelveys are outcasts due to their low social status and are shunned by everybody. The upper class parents believe that their children are ‘forced to mix together’ at school with the kids in the lower class and therefore should not interact with them. This causes the children to have the same social prejudice beliefs as their parents. Katherine Mansfield not only describes the behaviour imposed on the Kelveys, but also the viciousness of the brainwashed children. One instance is when Lena Logan, a girl from their school, harshly asks the Kelveys: ‘Is it true you’re going to be a servant Lil Kelvey?’ The other girls view this as a ‘marvellous thing to have said’ as they rush away, ‘wild with joy’. Because of their parental figures, the upper class children are rude, proud and arrogant: ‘They walk past the Kelveys with their heads in the air’. This is an imbalance between their id and superego. Their