Poultry for dinner in Katherine Mansfield's "prelude" and Virginia Woolf's "the shooting party"

Abstract

How are we to understand the relationship between violence and patriarchy? Does male domination rest upon the threat of violence? Two writers who tried to understand this link, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, reached quite different conclusions. . . . Both stories . . . firmly link violence against animals to violence against women, but they do this very differently. . . . The violence that its male characters unashamedly visit upon animals functions as a tacit warning to its female characters, whose immunity, as it turns out, is not really guaranteed. For Mansfield, violence is just one form of oppression among many, but Woolf identifies it as the foundation upon which patriarchy rests.