Katherine Mansfield - Bliss

In Bliss by Katherine Mansfield we have the theme of happiness, perception, deception, paralysis,
control, trust, dependency and acceptance. Taken from her collection of the same name the story
is narrated in the third person by an unnamed narrator and after reading the story it becomes clear
to the reader that Mansfield may be exploring the theme of happiness. Bertha can see nothing
wrong with her life. Everything in Bertha’s eyes is perfect. She has a loving husband, a beautiful
baby and a nice home. There is nothing in her life that she would like to change. However it is
interesting that Bertha in many ways feels stifled by the fact that she cannot express her happiness
as she would like to. The reader aware that Bertha is restricting herself to society’s opinion as to
how one should act. If anything Bertha’s happiness makes her feel like a child again. However she
knows that she must be careful in how she expresses herself. Again due to the preconceptions that
society might have. This might be important as Mansfield may be suggesting that at the time the
story was written any overt expression of happiness might have been considered to be unusual.
The reason being that women at the time would not necessarily have had the power to express how
they felt or have been allowed to express themselves. They had a place in society and that was to
be just behind their husbands. Bertha might be fully aware that she cannot openly show that she is
happy and may feel as though she has to adhere to the rules within society.
It is also clear to the reader that Harry is conducting an affair with Miss Fulton. Something that is
clearly noticeable not only to the reader but to Bertha too while both Harry and Miss Fulton are in
the hall. What is interesting about this encounter between Harry and Miss Fulton is that Bertha
does not intervene. It is as though the sight of both Harry and Miss Fulton leaves Bertha paralysed.
For the first time in the story Bertha is not in control of a situation. She is being forced to witness
her husband’s infidelities with another woman. What is also interesting about Miss Fulton is the
fact that the perception that Bertha has of her is not in fact true. She is not her friend and is more
interesting in pursuing a relationship with Harry than having a friendship with Bertha. If anything
Miss Fulton’s relationship with Bertha has been deceptive with her main goal being to pursue a
romance with Harry. Which leaves the reader suspecting that Miss Fulton’s attendance at the
dinner is more to Harry’s advantage than to Bertha’s. Yet this is not something that Bertha had
realised.
There may also be some symbolism in the story which may be important. Usually in literature a
black cat is bad luck however Mansfield compares Miss Fulton to a grey cat. This may be important
as Mansfield may be using the colour grey to suggest at least symbolically that Bertha does not
really know where she stands with Miss Fulton. Though she had previously considered her to be
a friend. This is not the case after Miss Fulton’s engagement with Harry. Similarly the pear tree is
described by Mansfield as being symbolic of Berta’s life. However at the end of the story the tree
is described as being still. Which would mirror the paralysis that Bertha feels. There is no
movement in either the tree or Bertha. She does not know which way to turn. Should she forget
about what she has seen or should she take action. The reader is left to believe that Bertha may
take no action such is the sense of shock she feels. It is as though her world has been turned upside
down. What started out as a day full of happiness has ended in a nightmare for Bertha...
Bertha can no longer trust Harry and trust would be the foundation of a successful marriage. The
repercussions of what has happened could be life changing for Bertha. At the time the story was
written women were reliant on the male for their income. Bertha is probably fully aware that she
cannot afford to leave Harry. She is to live her life stuck in a marriage with a man she cannot trust.
She has no other option. Though some critics might suggest that Bertha could down-size in life.
There is the baby to think of. Bertha in reality has no means to support either herself or the baby.
She is dependent entirely on Harry. Which leaves the reader to believe that nothing will change in
Bertha and Harry’s marriage. Bertha due to her dependency on Harry will accept what is happening
with regard to Harry and Miss Fulton. No longer will Bertha feel the happiness she had previously
felt prior to seeing Harry with Miss Fulton. Her life has changed from one of sheer joy to one of
total paralysis. Bertha will stay married to Harry because she believes that she has no choice but
to.

A Short Analysis of Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’

Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ is one of her first great short stories – the genre she excelled at (she
never wrote a novel, and her poetry failed to make a mark on the literary world). ‘Bliss’ was first
published in 1918, and is shot through with homoerotic longing and the animalistic nature of sexual
desire. However, because Mansfield was writing in 1918, these things can only be hinted at through
symbolism and suggestion, as this analysis will attempt to show…
‘Bliss’ (which can be read here) calls to mind the phrase ‘ignorance is bliss’, and this is the question
which lurks behind Mansfield’s story. Is it sometimes best to remain in the dark? Can some
knowledge overwhelm you and threaten to destroy your entire world? In summary, ‘Bliss’ focuses
on Bertha Young, a 30 year-old wife and mother who enjoys a comfortable middle-class life with
her husband Harry and their baby. However, as the story goes on, we wonder whether she does
‘enjoy’ her life. ‘Bliss’ begins by telling us that Bertha passes her days in an almost delirious state
of happiness and contentment, but we begin to wonder how a person can possibly sustain this level
of unbridled joy. Is it hiding an inner turmoil or nagging doubt that everything is not all right?
Since this is a modernist short story, we get to know the characters through moments in their lives
rather than through a coherent and action-driven plot. We see Bertha with her baby and the nanny,
and the protective way the nanny takes possession of the baby, as if shutting out the mother from
the picture. We learn that Bertha has recently made the acquaintance of a young, beautiful, and
exciting woman, Pearl Fulton, and there is a suggestion that Bertha idolises Pearl, and perhaps
even harbours sexual desire for her. Pearl is invited to the dinner party which Bertha and Harry are
hosting, and the remainder of the story focuses on this single evening.
The dinner party provides us with an opportunity to observe the characters as their true feelings
are suppressed by the social constraints of the event. Decorum has to be observed; Bertha can hint
at a deep affinity between her and Pearl, but can only do so through alluding in her conversation
to the pear tree (oddly enough, spelling out the first four letters of Pearl’s name) in the garden,
which Bertha interprets as a symbol for herself and Pearl. At the end of the evening, Bertha’s world
seems to come crashing down as she observes her husband putting Pearl’s coat on her shoulders
and arranging to meet up for a secret tryst with her. Bertha’s husband and Pearl are having an
affair! Once they have left, Bertha collapses in a chair and asks what is going to happen now. But
at this point the story ends: as with many modernist narratives, we are left (literally) with a question
at the end, the implication being that life more often presents us with unanswered questions than
it does easy solutions or neatly tied-up loose ends.
Food and fruit play an important symbolic role in ‘Bliss’, so it’s worth analysing how Katherine
Mansfield uses them. Observe the behaviour of Bertha’s husband, Harry, at dinner, where he
demonstrates a ‘shameless passion for the white flesh of the lobster’, the implication being that
Harry devours the ‘white flesh’ of beautiful women as rapaciously as he does the food on his
dinner-plate. The pear tree, similarly, is loaded with symbolism, although – as is so often the case
with modernism – its symbolism does not rely on some shared ‘code’ which we as readers simply
come along and decode, as would be the case if Mansfield had made it an apple tree instead (with
all of its connotations of temptation, sin, and the forbidden which the apple tree from the Garden
of Eden summons). The pear tree suggests these connotations but clouds them, making it difficult
for us to know for certain how we should interpret or analyse its significance in the story. The
apple tree and the Genesis story of Eve and the Fall of Man brings us back to knowledge (the
forbidden tree in Genesis is the Tree of Knowledge), and that takes us back to the story’s title,
‘Bliss’, with its invitation to recall the proverb ‘ignorance is bliss’. But pears are altogether more
succulent, luscious, and voluptuous than apples, so Mansfield combines sexual temptation with
more general ideas of sin and forbidden knowledge.

‘Bliss’ is one of Katherine Mansfield’s greatest short stories, and its greatness partly resides in its
ambiguities. Even Bertha’s final exclamation, ‘Oh, what is going to happen now?’, can be read
less as a declaration of despair than an embracing of the wild and unpredictable vagaries of life,
the same excitement at the unexpectedness of real life which grips Virginia Woolf’s narrator at the
end of her story ‘An Unwritten Novel’.
Many of the best stories of this period use, more or less explicitly, Mansfield's bisexual
sensibilities. "Bliss," for example, one of her most appreciated stories, begins with an ecstatic
young woman preparing to give a dinner party, almost a social rite, as she exults in her baby, her
husband, and her guests. Her ecstasy is innocent: she thinks of her relationship with her husband
as that of "good pals" and anticipates what might be their first night of passion after the dinner
party. She sees her baby daughter as a prize and is jealous of the necessary nursemaid; she loves
her other trophy, the enigmatic and attractive Miss Fulton, her social "find" to be set as the "fullest,
richest bloom" among the satirized stereotypes of the avant-garde--the artistic couple who both
dress, look, and act like chattering monkeys; the frightened and pretentious poet who sees himself
driving "through Eternity in a timeless taxi." The innocence is most manifestly represented in the
"lovely pear tree" outside the window, "its wide open blossoms as a symbol of her own life," a
symbol that the hostess, Bertha, first focuses on herself and then shows to Miss Fulton, depicted
as a goddess of the moon about to touch the blossoms of the tree as a sign of their intimacy.
The pear tree, although it has been read as a lesbian symbol, appears in Mansfield's journal as a
tree that signified to both her and her brother the innocence of their New Zealand childhoods. The
story subtly develops the sexuality of Bertha's ambivalent attractions and sustains an ambiguity
about her consciousness of her implicit feelings. But Bertha's consciousness is painfully exposed
and her innocence destroyed when she sees unmistakable signs of a sexual affair between her
husband and Miss Fulton. She feels doubly betrayed--the victim, not the apex, of a sexual triangle.
In developing her themes so subtly and resonantly, Mansfield achieves a story of considerably
compressed effectiveness. Some critics have followed Murry in thinking the story a "sophisticated
failure" in which "the discordant combination of caricature with emotional pathos" helps create
the failure. But most critics regard the combination of "caricature with emotional pathos" as part
of the point: Bertha is in some ways as silly as the fashionable chattering monkeys; the posturing
poet is as betrayed by the fashionable ambivalences of feeling as Bertha is. The line between the
posturing and the genuine wavers in a world in which characters are so uncertain and changeable
about what they feel, and both honest emotion and the bliss of expectation are invariably betrayed.