Social Alienation and Displacement in Faulkner’s “Barn Burning”, Henry’s “The Social Triangle” and Mansfield’s “The Doll’s House”

Abstract

The present study questions the role of the state in reproducing class relations and interpellating lower class people. The state employs repressive and ideological apparatuses to maintain the ruling class hegemony. The apparatuses the study examines in the context of the selected stories include school, family, court and materiality.  Teachers and parents in Mansfield's "The Doll's House", justices in Faulkner's "Barn Burning" and materiality in Henry's "The Social Triangle" are the state agents of repression which lower class characters in the stories could not protest or rebel against. Their assimilation of the upper class culture, the narrators assert, gets them nowhere but to eventually become alienated. This accounts for their failure to attain social mobility.