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Literary Devices
Definition of Allusion
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to other literary works, famous individuals, historical events, or philosophical ideas... read full definition
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to other literary works, famous individuals... read full definition
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to... read full definition
Allusions
Explanation and Analysis—Chekhov:
As Bertha observes her dinner guests chatting and eating, she is struck by a feeling of contentment and appreciation, and this feeling compels her to compare them to characters in a Chekhov play:
They were dears—dears—and she loved having them there, at her table, and giving them delicious food and wine. In fact, she longed to tell them how delightful they were, and what a decorative group they made, how they seemed to set one another off and how they reminded her of a play by Tchekof!
This allusion to the 19th-century Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekhov (or "Tchekof") is a nod to one of Mansfield's influences—she admired Chekhov's work, once referring to him as "Darling Tchekof" in a diary entry—and a progenitor of 20th-century literary modernism. Chekhov, like Mansfield and other modernists, focused on psychological complexity and interiority in his fiction, and he drew rich insight from small, seemingly ordinary moments in life.
The allusion also hints at Bertha's own superficiality and outsized attention to surfaces. Chekhov's plays do feature "decorative," well-to-do people carousing at social events, but they are also fundamentally concerned with troubled relationships, self-reflection, and the sorrow and misery contained in the human condition. Like Mansfield (who in this story excavates the emotional significance behind a routine dinner party), Chekhov sought to uncover the inner conflicts experienced by his high-society Russian characters, and he constructed masterful plots in which those conflicts were eventually exposed and tested but rarely resolved. By alluding to Chekhov, Mansfield seems to be signaling to the reader that all is not what it seems at Bertha's "delightful" dinner party—that the tensions Bertha is experiencing may soon come to a head and ultimately lead to an unsatisfying conclusion.
Related Themes:
