Marriage a la Mode

William is the story’s first protagonist, an upper-class man who lives and works in London and travels to visit his wife and children in the country on the weekends. He is anxious and self-conscious, preoccupied with his increasing alienation from Isabel and his children. He wants to provide the best possible life for them but reflects that his children are mainly preoccupied with the gifts he brings them, and Isabel seems less and less interested in seeing him at all. While these thoughts produce a “gnawing” feeling in his chest, he soothes himself by focusing on his work.

While William feels isolated due to his wife and her friends’ behavior, he shows his own biases in the story’s opening scene on the train; seated in first class, he thinks derisively about “a red-faced girl” trying to catch the train, calling her “hysterical” (2). Likewise, he sees “a greasy, black-faced workman” and thinks “a filthy life!” (2). His attitude toward lower-class people is unsympathetic and unimaginative and illustrates the class situation in England in the 1920s. Modernists were often concerned with anti-hierarchical ideas, and Katherine Mansfield injects class critique into the story through William’s unkind thoughts here.

Still, William is a man enamored with his wife and traditional ideas of family life.