Marriage a la Mode

“Marriage à la Mode” is a Modernist short story that depicts the social transformations and changes brought about by modernization in Britain in the early 1920s. It examines a woman’s transformation through her husband’s perspective and explores the couple’s unhappiness.

The story has three settings: a train from London to the country, Isabel and William’s new home in an unspecified country locale, and William’s memories of their old home in London. These settings embody the tension between old, traditional values (embodied by the old house) and new, modern ones (embodied by the new one); the train as a connecting space between the two reflects industrialization’s role in creating this change. The action unfolds in vignettes that take place over a weekend and a Monday morning, highlighting the most pertinent incidents during William’s isolating weekend at home. The story consists of three parts and is narrated from William’s point of view for the first two. The last part is told from Isabel’s point of view. Their separate narrations emphasize their estrangement from each other, reflecting the Modernist preoccupation with alienation.

In the first part of the story, Katherine Mansfield uses free indirect speech to wander in the main character’s mind. Free indirect speech is a literary technique in which the narrator’s third-person voice merges with the character’s first-person stream of consciousness to express the character’s inner subjectivity. William’s memories, thoughts, and concerns characterize himself, his marriage, and his feelings about Isabel’s transformation. They also show his desires and imaginings: He is nostalgic for his and Isabel’s old home, loves his wife, and wants to be loved by her. The disconnect between them is reflected in the literary style, as the narrator reveals much about William’s interiority, while William expresses none of his wishes to her. He is alone with his loneliness and feels alienated from all of the other characters, a stranger in his own home.

The major conflicts are clearly defined from the start: Isabel is horrified by anything “dreadfully sentimental” or ordinary and wants poet and artist friends to round out a sophisticated life; meanwhile, William yearns for their old way of life before Isabel met Moira Morrison and her clique. The main conflict is that William and Isabel have two incompatible outlooks regarding what they really want for themselves and from each other; these outlooks reflect a broader Tension Between Tradition and Modernity. Mansfield shows negative aspects of each perspective, where William is bourgeoise and looks down on the working-class train passengers (reflecting England’s strict, traditional class hierarchy) and Isabel and her friends only superficially engage with new artistic ideas. The story’s title, “Marriage à la Mode,” means “a fashionable marriage,” implying that this tension was not unique or rare when the story was published.

In the second and third parts, dialogue and description move the story along and convey the vacuity of the social interactions happening among the characters. All of the characters are hungry in their different ways; William yearns for his wife’s affection, and Isabel longs for sophistication and excitement. Isabel’s friends’ hunger is baser, as they eat and drink nonstop during the story. Their ravenous appetites reveal The Shallowness of Bohemian Circles—ironically, while they are self-important and view themselves as sophisticated and artistic, they are only concerned with consumption rather than creation. Their chatter juxtaposes sharply with William’s silence throughout the narrative, contrasting their superficial concerns with his meditations on love and loneliness.

Likewise, their constant speech is juxtaposed with the failure of communication in Isabel and William’s marriage. The two do not communicate throughout the text, and as Isabel accompanies William to his taxi after the weekend, they “walk […] together silently,” and he feels that “there [is] nothing to say now” (6). He resorts to writing a long letter to articulate all that he is unable to say, though even this becomes misconstrued through Isabel and her friends’ mockery. When Isabel realizes he has left an opening for her to communicate honestly, she finds the task too emotionally difficult. She cannot face the seriousness of the matter and nullifies the letter’s communicative urgency, reducing it to something “absurd,” “ridiculous,” “too marvelous,” and sentimental (7).

The moment Isabel retreats to her room and decides to stay inside and write back to William marks the resolution; however, the story ends with a plot twist. Isabel runs downstairs to her friends, postponing her reply to William and choosing her “new” ways for good. The last sentence of the story conveys Isabel’s shift and provides an ironic comment through its choice of words: “And, laughing, in the new way, she ran down the stairs” (8). The narrator reinforces William’s point of view about Isabel’s change by repeating William’s remark about Isabel’s new way of laughing. At the end of the story, however, William is not there observing her; the narrator borrows his phrasing to convey a truth about Isabel and the resolution of her character arc.