PUC-MINAS

ICH – Departamento de Letras

Disciplina: Estudos Literários V: Literaturas de Língua Inglesa C
Professora: Priscila Campello
Aluno: Guilherme Castro

Journal

Irony as a reflection of disbelief in “Bliss”, by Katherine Mansfield.

Katherine Mansfield composes a rather ironic story, or so it seems as we follow Bertha

Young, a woman that can have little moments of childish bliss, although she is already thirty.
This adversative conjunction gives the idea of Bertha being too old to allow herself such
trivial things, like dancing steps and laughing at nothing, despite her last name, and introduce
the irony that will be present until the end.

This ironic tone can be perceived all along the text. We grow interested in the story of
this lady who is so excited, about what we don’t know, and she blames her society for not
allowing her to be in such bliss without any consistent reason. We do know that Bertha is
about to receive in her home the visit of very dear friends: a couple, a man and a lady with
whom she is fascinated, although she doesn’t know why – a kind of a je ne sais quoi feeling.
Bertha feels that she and this lady, Miss Fulton, share something special. Later, in another
strike of irony, she finds out that it is her husband they share.

The text also seems to mock modern society at the time. By making the characters
despise classical plays or poetry from Romanticism, the narrator points out that the new
values or ideas they try to bring are just trifles coming from a boring, empty class of young
writers trying to renew the arts. This can be noted through not funny jokes made by Harry and
some comments by their friends, like when Miss Knights brings up her decorating chat at the
same time as Warren talks about making a revolution in English theatre, or when he spoils an
Romantic image, saying “you can’t put out to sea without being seasick and wanting a basin”.
Later, he quotes an “incredibly beautiful line” of a modern poem about tomato soup.

The way Mansfield uses irony in Bliss, describing what is happening on the art
scenario on the London of her time shows, perhaps, how skeptic the author was on behalf of
the new premises of the art at that time.