Analysis of “Fueille d’album”

Analysis of Katherine Mansfield’s “Fueille d’album”
The text under analysis is an extract from “Fueille d’album”, which is written by Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp Murry. She was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. Her stories often focus on moments of disruption and frequently open rather abruptly. Among her best-known stories are "The Garden Party", "The Daughters of the Late Colonel" and "The Fly".
“Feuille d'Album” is a 1917 short story. It was first published in the New Age on 20 September 1917 under the title of An Album Leaf. A revised version later appeared in Bliss and Other Stories.
The personage’s characterization is managed with great depth of insight. Main character of the story is a young painter whose appearance evokes mixed feelings. While describing him Mrs. Mansfield uses direct and indirect methods of characterization. From the extract it’s quite hard to judge whether he is static or dynamic. But we can easily say that he is a stock character, because he is very recognizable. The author wants to show an image of “painter” which will be familiar to readers. She tries to endow her hero with such characteristics as inscrutability, strangeness and uncommonness. The language of the writer is very rich and full of various kinds of stylistic devices. They help the reader to picture the main character. For example, the epithet “impossible” and the antithesis “With absolutely nothing to say for himself. And such a weight” describe him as a mysterious and unusual person. Also, with a help of these stylistic devices author takes pains to tell the reader that it is hard to describe the main character by words. Moreover, Katherine Mansfield uses the epithet “too shy” and the simile “like the tortoise stove” show that the hero is quite close person and has his own inner world. The following sentence characterizes him as a smart person with interesting appearance which attracted people: “The strange thing was that at first sight he looked more interesting”. The enumeration “He had black close-cropped hair, grey eyes and long lashes, white cheeks and a mouth” helps the reader imagine the painter. We can guess that the main character is stylish with a help of repetition “blue jersey and the grey jacket”. Also, the author with skill uses irony: “as if that were not enough, there was his trick of blushing” to show that he can charm every person.
The story is told from the third point of view. The speaker is outside the action and is mainly a reporter of actions. The tone of the author throughout the extract is ironic and sarcastic, she tries to raise her character and at the same time bring down him. As for language, this paragraph is a combination of description and narration. The text is written in the modernist mode, without a set structure, and with many shifts in the narrative. The style of the extract is clear-cut and elegant, the paragraph contains complete thought. The vocabulary of the story is quite complicated, that is why it is aimed to adults.
It is quite hard to catch the main idea of the story from this extract. But in the extract Katherine Mansfield tries to show the readers an image of “painter”. The artist should attract people not only with help of his perfect appearance, but with help of his inner world. May be in the beginning you will be interesting for them, but then they will be bored by your beauty. We should remember that our superior envelope would not bring us to the success.