One of the themes that can be found in Katherine Mansfield's stories centers on the role, status, sexuality and "place" of women in society. According to Chantal Cornut-Gentille d'Arcy, "Mansfield's concise narratives... are triumphs of style, a style that defies the conventional parameters of nineteenth-century realism, bound by plot, sequential development, climax and conclusion" (244). More specifically, he argues that "although Mansfield never acknowledged any deep involvement with Freudian approaches to sexuality or mental disorders... Mansfield operated in a context that undoubtedly indicates that he was aware of Freud's ideas and discoveries " (245). This is evident in 'Life of Ma Parker,' which depicts the life of a widowed housekeeper who has experienced nothing but tragedy her entire life and who most recently had the horrible task of burying her loving grandson ( Lohafer 475). But Parker is written by Mansfield from both a Freudian psychological perspective and a sociological perspective. Susan Lohafer characterizes the story as "a spare iconography of working-class life that makes the story a perfect set for cultural studies" (475). In the story, an elderly cleaning lady not only has to deal with the death of her grandson, but also has to deal with the fact that she has nowhere to go where she can be alone and give in to her grief. Nothing he achieved in his entire working life led to the acquisition of such a private place. Instead, she buried her husband, a baker who died of "white lung disease" and the children who survived the high infant mortality rate became victims of other ills of the late-Victorian underclass: immigration, prostitution, ill health... .. . half of the paper ... so often dismissed as the 'mafia'" (247). Thus, Bertha's feelings are likely to be regarded by her husband - if he had noticed - as inappropriate and devoid of dignity and propriety. In this way, Mansfield established some key information about the society he lived in and how it valued and positioned women. He also seems to have recognized that this was not the case by Ma Parker and Bertha Young – was shaped and informed by the force that women therefore had little control over in these stories as frustrated, as victims and unable to control their own destiny. Mansfield's psychological understanding of these issues distinguishes his writing.