Women’s Plight in Katherine Mansfield’s Life Of Ma Parker :: Life Of Ma Parker Essays

Katherine Mansfields Life of Ma Parker presents the plight of Ma Parker as a seduceing-class womanhood at the turn of the century, in terms of her position in the sphere of the family and in the sphere of society. Life of Ma Parker is a story of a widowed charwoman. Like Miss Brill, Ma Parker is a very lonely woman, but their equally painful story is told quite differently, mainly because Mansfield supplies no background to floor why Miss Brills Sunday passes as it does. As the title of the story denotes, we receive the story of Ma Parkers life, which explains her current situation. As servant, wife, and mother, shes the generic British working-class female at the turn of the century cowed by drudgery and burdened by loss. Her husband, a baker, died of white lung disease, and those children who survived the laid-back rate of infant mortality fell victim to other ills of the late-Victorian underclass emigration, prostitution, poor health, worse luck (Lohafer 475). At the present point in the story, Ma Parker arrives to work in the house of the literary gentleman after she buried the previous day her loving grandson, Lennie, who was the only ray of light in her gentle life. According to Irigaray, all the systems of exchange that organize patriarchal societies and all the modalities of productive work that are recognized, values, and rewarded in these societies are mens business.the work force is this always assumed to be masculine, and products are objects to be used, objects of exertion among men alone (171). Ma Parker has to play the role of an object circulated among masculine employers as she has to support her children and herself. Ma begins working as early as the age of sixteen as a kitching-maid (143). Later on, when that family was sold up she went as overhaul to a doctors house, and after two years there, on the run from morning till light, she married her husband (144). Ma is an object of transaction among men, as she transfers from one male e mployee to another, until she is married. Now then, Ma was working for the literary man, as people advised him to get a hag in at once a week to clean up (142, my italics). The literary man, insensitive to his surroundings and lonely as Ma Parker at the same time, dirties everything around him and leaves it all smell like a gigantic dustbin (142), but Ma pitied the poor young gentleman for having no one to look after him (142).