i also saw the light: katherine mansfield's the doll's house

This is not a victim story. When my sister and I were in middle school, we were pushed, called names, laughed at, and regularly excluded by the other children. We were not invited for sleepovers. When the boys would shove each other into us and screech like maniacs, chasing each other around with “Lavell fleas,” the girls would sit primly on the school steps, giggling into their hands.

I offer this truth only by way of indicating how astonished I was, how utterly gob-smacked, with the parallels between our lives and those of the “poor little Kelveys” in Katherine Mansfield’s classic short story, The Doll’s House.

Written in 1922, the story shows how wealthier parents poison their children against the poor, and for poorer children, the social barriers against overcoming the position into which they, and their parents, were born.

In The Doll’s House, three little wealthy girls, the Burnells, receive an astonishing gift, an amazing doll’s house, fully furnished and realistic, and they use it as social capital, bringing the other proper little girls in pairs back to their yard to see the marvelous thing. All except two little unfortunates, the Kelveys. Daughters of an Irish washerwoman and an absent drunken father, Lil and Else Kelvey are disdained by the others, and so, of course, meant to be denied the doll’s house delight. But in the end, Kezia, the youngest Burnell, invites the Kelveys into the yard and, for a brief moment before being shooed away, they get to see it.

I encountered this story at three different times in my life; the first time, in high school. I had read stories before in which there were poorer characters, even stories that inspired sympathy for the poor. But I had never really seen a story that showed so completely an understanding of those characters. A story that was about those characters, and in which the reader was on their side.

It was the first story I ever read that clearly acknowledged social class hierarchy and prejudice. Though I was too young at the time to define what social class disadvantage even was, I knew and experienced its effects often.

The similarities between us and the Kelveys were undeniable. My sister, one year older than me and two inches taller, and I were often seen wearing other people’s hand-me-downs, faded dresses too long or too short. When out in the world, we were silent little, big-eyed urchins. My mother was not a washerwoman but she was uneducated and a Christian to boot, so yes, definitely seen as lacking the proper culture. My father, like the Kelvey father, was a rife subject for titillating gossip.

Leaned up against the brick wall of the old school at recess, reading, as was my typical way of making it through recess, I read this story over again. Too young and inexperienced to have a literary vocabulary, still, I could see that the author was taking the Kelveys’ point-of-view.

It made me personally happy that the little girls did get the chance to see that amazing dollhouse. At their age, I would have so liked to have a dollhouse like that. Or a pretty painted room of my own, like some of the girls at my school had, or a canopied bed, or a musical jewelry box. Or new clothes that looked nice.

I didn’t spend my days and nights craving them. But if I were to dream, while flipping through the Eaton’s catalogue, say, I would have liked to have them.

But more than that, my high school self felt somehow understood by that story. Validated. I felt the author knew me, and accepted me, kind of liked me. Just because of the story she had written.

Instead of a sympathetic tongue clicking at the plight of “those less fortunate than ourselves,” as the poor were then characterized, this story had a sharp finger pointing at the cruel “better” kids and their parents.

I read it as an affirmation. Someone . . . some woman . . . long ago, understood my life. She knew about the cruelty of children who had things. And where they learned that cruelty. She knew the degradations of poverty on the poor. Knew it wasn’t our fault. And she knew that what was done to us, though it hurt us, was not the sum total of who we were.

She ended the story back with the Kelvey girls, out of view of prying eyes and unkind judgements. And she had little Else, with one of her rare smiles, telling her sister, “I seen the little lamp.” 
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The writer seemed to see my spirit too, my hopefulness, my determination to get away, to move up, to be something better. And the possibility, maybe even the inevitability that, someday, I would prevail. That someday, I would transcend the shabby expectations I had been allotted.

She knew that the story of a girl like me did not have to be a victim story, but instead could be one of hope.

A writer did that.

And because of this story, and others, I decided that someday, I would be a writer too. Because I had those kinds of stories to tell. About poor people and who they really were; interesting, complex people whose stories were worth knowing.

In my university Literature course, I came to a better understanding of the symbolism of the lamp as transcendence. By grad school, I was the one pointing out the workings of social class and the place of figures of authority in maintaining social hierarchy. 

Rustic dollhouse made by Uncle Art Taylor, artwork by Terisa Taylor, photo credit Cindy Taylor.

Around that time, I was also working on genealogy, building my family tree, and found an even stranger parallel between this story and my life. I discovered that my grandmother Josephine’s Irish granny’s maiden name… was Kelvey. True story. And that is why, in writing A Seven Year Ache, I bequeathed to my Rosie the married name, Kelvey.

There is a fond place in my heart for this story, and for Katherine Mansfield, the long-ago woman who wrote it. Just as with a first love or a first kiss or a first friend, The Doll’s House is memorable and bittersweet and stands, unblemished, in time. This story was the first glimmer in a life’s journey to read, and to write for, my own people.

And through this story, I also "seen" the light.