Journal of Literary Semantics 2017; 46(1): 67–85

Terence Patrick Murphy* and Kelly S. Walsh

Unreliable Third Person Narration? The Case
of Katherine Mansfield
DOI 10.1515/jls-2017-0005

Abstract: The concept of an unreliable third-person narrator may seem a contra-

diction in terms. The very act of adopting a third-person stance to tell a story
would appear to entail an acceptance of a basic need for truth-telling, a commit-
ment to what Wayne Booth terms the implied author’s “norms of the work.”
Nonetheless, in the essay that follows, three of Katherine Mansfield’s short
stories – “A Cup of Tea” (1922), “Bliss” (1918) and “Revelations” (1920) – will
be examined in order to demonstrate how the strategic suppression of the
distinction between the voice of the narrator and that of the central character
can lead to a strong sense of unreliability. In order to read such narratives
effectively, the reader must reappraise the value of certain other stylistic ele-
ments, including the use of directives involved with directly quoted speech,
seemingly minor discrepancies between adjacent sentences and, perhaps most
importantly, the structure of the fiction itself. We contend that Mansfield’s use of
this form of unreliable third-person fiction is her unique contribution to the
short story genre.

Keywords: colored narrative, free indirect discourse, implied author, internal

deviation, Katherine Mansfield, narrative reliability, third-person narration

Third-person narrators, because they can often be assumed to be the author, are much
more usually omniscient. Hence when a third-person narrator is limited or unreliable the
effect is very heavily foregrounded. (Short 1996: 259)

I cannot remember an hour when she was entirely “off duty,” so to speak, from being a
writer. … It was easy for her with her acute and precise observation to “take off” and to
act scenes which she had seen and turn them into mockery. No one could so impersonate
her victims and catch the mannerisms, the talk and the superficial absurdities in people as
she could.
Lady Ottoline Morrell on Katherine Mansfield (quoted in Hankin 1983: 140)

*Corresponding author: Terence Patrick Murphy, Department of English, Yonsei University,

Seoul 03722, Korea, E-mail: tmurphy@yonsei.ac.kr
Kelly S. Walsh, Department of English, Yonsei University, Seoul 03722, Korea,
E-mail: kswalsh@yonsei.ac.kr

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68 Terence Patrick Murphy and Kelly S. Walsh

1 Introduction
At first blush, the concept of an unreliable third-person narrator seems to
make little sense. The very act of adopting a third-person stance to tell a
story would appear to entail an acceptance of a basic need for truth-telling,
a commitment to what Wayne Booth terms the implied author’s “norms of the
work.” As Booth writes: “For lack of better terms, I have called a narrator
reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work
(which is to say, the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not”
(Booth 1991: 158–159). Nonetheless, as Booth suggests, sometimes our sense of
unreliable narration may derive not so much from our sense of the reliability of
the narrator but rather from our contemplation of the story as “a completed
artistic whole”:

Our sense of the implied author includes not only the extractable meanings but also the
moral and emotional content of each bit of action and suffering of all of the characters. It
includes, in short, the intuitive apprehension of a completed artistic whole; the chief value
to which this implied author is committed, regardless of what party his creator belongs to
in real life, is that which is expressed by the total form. (Booth 1991: 73)

But is it possible to imagine a third-person narrator that obscures “our sense of

the implied author” as we read each individual sentence and yet who obeys it as
we contemplate the “completed artistic whole”? Or, to put it differently, what
sort of aesthetic effect may be produced if the distinction between the third-
person narrator and a central character is repeatedly suppressed?
In the essay that follows, we argue that Katherine Mansfield’s distinctive
use of colored narrative creates just this type of narrative unreliability, result-
ing in a small shock or frisson for the attentive reader; and our primary test-
case will be the short story “A Cup of Tea”. Our analysis will demonstrate how
the absence of a clear modulation back and forth between objective narrative
and the viewpoint of the central character creates a strong sense of unrelia-
bility. In order to read such narratives productively, the discerning reader must
give greater weight to certain other stylistic elements. These include the lexical,
and occasionally ideological, choices of the central character; the narrator’s
directives informing directly quoted speech; and, perhaps most importantly,
the compositional structure of the story taken as a whole (which may also
encompass the title). The essay will then more briefly note the use of a similar
technique in two other Mansfield short stories, “Bliss” and “Revelations.”
Ultimately, we contend that Mansfield’s masterful use of an unreliable third-
person narrator constitutes her unique contribution to the short story genre.

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 Unreliable Third Person Narration 69

2 The reliability of third-person narration

It was the Chicago critic, Wayne Booth, who first introduced the critical concepts
of reliability and unreliability into the critical literature. In his celebrated defini-
tion of narrative reliability, Booth drew attention to the underlying relationship
between the implied author of the narrative and the reader’s “intuitive appre-
hension of a completed artistic whole.” Subsequent critics have tended to
concur with Booth in this method of assessing narrative reliability. In
Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (1978), for example, Meir
Sternberg suggests:

The author or (in Wayne Booth’s suggestive phrase) “implied author” – the omnipotent
artistic figure behind the work, incessantly selecting, combining, and distributing
information, and pulling various strings with a view to manipulating the reader into
the desired responses – is the creator of the art of the work as well as its meaning, of
its rhetoric as well as of its normative ground-work and thematic pattern. (Sternberg
1978: 254)

Sternberg also argues, though, that the reader “does not as a rule come into
direct contact with the implied author himself,” for, generally, “the author
interposes another figure between himself and the reader, namely, the narrator –
the person or persona that actually does the telling” (Sternberg 1978: 255). With
first-person narration, this interposition entails a clear distinction between the
author, as a living, breathing human being, and the narrator or central character
of the fiction. However, Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short have questioned
the relevance of the distinction in third-person narration. They contend
that the absence of an “I” in third-person narration causes the reader “to
collapse the addresser side of the novel’s discourse structure, so that implied
author and narrator become merged” (Leech and Short 2007: 213–214). These
stylisticians suggest that this collapse results in the emergence of the illusion of
omniscience: “It is for this reason that most third-person narrators are, for
the purposes of the fiction, omniscient: because they stand in the place of
the implied author they take on his absolute knowledge” (Leech and Short
2007: 214).
In his contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Narrative (2007),
H. Porter Abbott argues that Gérard Genette’s distinction between “homodie-
getic” and “heterodiegetic” narrators is more productive than that of “first-
person” and “third-person.” But even while using Genette’s terminology,
Abbott maintains that the narrator’s reliability is predicated upon their proxi-
mity to the storyworld:

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70 Terence Patrick Murphy and Kelly S. Walsh

In a valuable distinction, displacing the much less useful distinction between first-person
and third-person narration, Gérard Genette identified homodiegetic narrators as those who
are also characters in the storyworld (or diegesis) and therefore necessarily closer to the
action than heterodiegetic narrators, who stand outside the storyworld. The latter tend to
have greater reliability, inspiring more confidence in the information and views they
convey and often deploying third-person narration throughout. (Abbott 2007: 42)

Citing Felix Martinez-Bonati’s claim that “the validity attributed to the narrator’s
mimetic discourse is maximal, absolute” (quoted in Culler 2004: 25), Jonathan
Culler also argues that the distance between the narrator and the storyworld is
crucial for determining reliability: “The truth of the heterodiegetic narrator’s
discourse is, in Kantian terms, a transcendental principle of the comprehension
or experience of literary narration” (Culler 2004: 25). For Culler, then, the
“truthfulness” of what the narrator says is dependent on her or his distance
from the characters. If “the narrator turns into a character” (Culler 2004: 27), the
claims must be treated with suspicion and handled differently.
But how exactly is the distance between narrator and central character
established in the first place? Some time ago, Graham Hough offered a pertinent
discussion of the central issues. As he states: “Lively raconteurs have two main
weapons – one is their own individual wit and insight, the other is the power of
mimicking, of entering into another’s being, of momentarily becoming another
character” (Hough 1980: 58). It is a curious fact that in a narrative this distinc-
tion between “individual wit and insight” and mimicry is not normally very
difficult to make; it is not, for instance, dependent upon anything so complex as
a deep linguistic understanding of the standard speech of the day. Instead, the
distinction is based on something internal to the literary fiction itself, something
that is usually set up within the first two or three paragraphs of the work.
As Hough writes:

The reader of novels almost unconsciously registers the speech of the characters as
natural, affected, pompous or vulgar or whatnot, without any solid evidence about the
standard speech of the day – without any evidence that a linguist could find acceptable.
He can do this because it is a matter of internal relations. He is not in fact comparing the
speech of the characters to a standard outside the work, but to a standard set or implied by
the work itself. Novelists will be found to vary widely in the sort of scales they set up and
the importance they attach to them. Some use a very wide range of speech patterns, some a
very restricted one; some seem to make a large claim to mimetic accuracy, some seem to
regard it with indifference. (Hough 1980: 64)

Understanding the relationship among these speech patterns, then, involves

discerning the relationship among different elements of the text in question.
As Hough suggests, a literary narrative may be divided up into a range of
stylistic conventions: some in which the character is entirely implicated; some

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 Unreliable Third Person Narration 71

in which the characters are described; and others in which these characters have
no expressive share. In cases of the last type, “the vocabulary, syntax and
rhetorical ordonnance are entirely those of the narrator” (Hough 1980: 50).
Hough refers to this latter stylistic form as “objective narrative.” It consists of
“passages where the facts are presented to us as facts, uncoloured, not from any
particular point of view, manifestly to be accepted as true, uncontaminated
either by the subjectivity of the author or that of any of the characters”
(Hough 1980: 50). The veracity, or “uncoloured” nature, of “objective narrative,”
Hough adds, stems from the simple, unaffected presentation of facts “in a
language formal and correct both in syntax and vocabulary. A language too
that is quite unidiosyncratic” (Hough 1980: 53). As Hough explains in relation to
his discussion of the use of objective narrative in Jane Austen’s Emma:

Passages of this kind are fairly extensive but not dominant. There are fifteen pages at the
beginning and scattered passages of from two to five pages throughout the book. They
occur, as I have said, when the scene is to be set, circumstances explained, and new
characters introduced; and also though often in a less pure form, in short pieces where a
sequence of events – shifts of scene – change of partners – has to be presented between
conversations. (Hough 1980: 50)

For Hough, direct speech is set against objective narrative; and the convention
underpinning direct speech entails that it is “entirely mimetic, in which no trace
of the narrator’s voice is heard” (Hough 1980: 49). Hough’s distinction between
uncolored, objective narrative and mimetic, direct speech opens the space for
what he calls that “large intermediate area, formally narrative, which in fact
represents the thoughts, spoken or unspoken, of the characters, and goes far
towards reproducing their actual mode of expression – their vocabulary, syntax
and rhetorical ordonnance, rather than those of the narrator” (Hough 1980: 49).
This “large intermediate area,” which, for Hough, is crucial, is a stylistic mode
“into which the objective narrative, after a time, very commonly modulates.
I mean by it narrative or reflection or observation more or less deeply coloured
by a particular character’s point of view” (Hough 1980: 50).
Hough uses two terms for this intermediate mode; the first is colored
narrative, the second is free indirect discourse. While critics remain divided on
the extent to which this mode can create textual indeterminacy (e. g., Vološinov
1973; Bakhtin 1981; LaCapra 1982; Stanzel 1984; Fludernik 1993; Gunn 2004;
Leech and Short 2007; McHale 2014),1 there is a broad consensus that colored

1 Vološinov (1973) writes: “When a complete solidarity in values and intonations exists
between the author and his hero within the framework of a rhetorically constructed context,
the author’s rhetoric and that of the hero begin to overlap: their voices merge; and we get

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72 Terence Patrick Murphy and Kelly S. Walsh

narrative or free indirect discourse functions “as a tool for regulating distance
from a character” (McHale 2014; emphasis in original). For Hough, as his analysis
of the opening of Emma (1816) concretely demonstrates, objective narration
frequently slides into the second, more colored form, usually within the space
of a few paragraphs:

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy
disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly
twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
She was the youngest of the two daughters of a most affectionate, indulgent father; and
had, in consequence of her sister’s marriage, been mistress of his house from a very early
period. Her mother had died too long ago for her to have more than an indistinct
remembrance of her caresses; and her place had been supplied by an excellent woman
as governess, who had fallen little short of a mother in affection.
Sixteen years had Miss Taylor been in Mr. Woodhouse’s family, less as a governess than a
friend, very fond of both daughters, but particularly of Emma. Between them it was more
the intimacy of sisters. Even before Miss Taylor had ceased to hold the nominal office of
governess, the mildness of her temper had hardly allowed her to impose any restraint; and
the shadow of authority being now long passed away, they had been living together as
friend and friend very mutually attached, and Emma doing just what she liked; highly
esteeming Miss Taylor’s judgment, but directed chiefly by her own. (Austen 1998: 3)

In his own discussion of these paragraphs, David Lodge notes how the author
slips from a classic, objective style into one that is marked by the stylistic
peculiarities of the character of Emma herself: “Jane Austen’s opening is classi-
cal: lucid, measured, objective, with ironic implications concealed behind the
elegant velvet glove of the style” (Lodge 1992: 5). After two paragraphs that serve
to define the novel’s stylistic texture, in the third, Lodge argues:

protracted passages that belong simultaneously to the author’s narrative and to the hero’s
internal (though sometimes also external) speech” (138); Bakhtin (1981) notes: “The language
used by characters in the novel, how they speak, is verbally and semantically autonomous;
each character’s speech possesses its own belief system, since each is the speech of another in
another’s language; thus it may also refract authorial intentions and consequentially may to a
certain degree constitute a second language for the author” (305); LaCapra (1982) emphasizes
the “indeterminacy of narrative voice” in free indirect discourse, which “renders decisive
judgment about character or story difficult to attain” (59–60); Stanzel (1984) speaks of “con-
tamination” (192), the way in which the narrative voice is “infected” by the characters;
Fludernik (1993), on the other hand, insists that the voice of the narrator and that of the
character do not intermingle, that the reader must infer to whom the utterance belongs
(452–453); Gunn, reading Emma, disagrees that the interplay of voices in Austen’s free indirect
discourse “necessarily entails interpretive instability or the disruption of narrative authority,”
arguing, instead, that the “continual shifts and modulations are indications of Austen’s
prodigious artistic control” (42, 50).

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 Unreliable Third Person Narration 73

We begin to hear the voice of Emma herself in the discourse, as well as the judicious,
objective voice of the narrator. “Between them it was more the intimacy of sisters.” “They
had been living together as friend and friend …” In these phrases we seem to hear Emma’s
own, rather self-satisfied description of her relationship with her governess, one which
allowed her to do “just what she liked.” (Lodge 1992: 6)

Lodge’s critical assessment of the interplay between an objective narrative voice

and a second voice colored by Emma’s own thoughts and feelings has been
echoed elsewhere. In the second edition of Linguistic Criticism (1996), for exam-
ple, Roger Fowler lays stress on the importance of what he terms free indirect
discourse to allow for “internal perspective in which the character’s subjective
feelings … are interwoven with and framed by the author’s account of the
character’s internal state” (Fowler 1996: 174). In using this device, Fowler
suggests, “a writer is able to juxtapose two sets of values, to imply a critique
of the character’s views, without the direct judgment which an external perspec-
tive would produce” (Fowler 1996: 174). And in his contribution to The
Cambridge Companion to Narrative (2007), Michael Toolan argues that James
Joyce’s short story “Two Gallants” employs a similar tactic:

In a story like “Two Gallants,” for example, the narrative appears to proceed smoothly, in
the past tense and referring to Lenehan in the third person. But a point comes when the
narration is no longer detached and external; it adopts the character’s viewpoint, revealing
what Lenehan alone (and not “the narrator”) is thinking, in Lenehan’s language. (Toolan
2007: 241)

As Toolan implies, the modulation from the narrative voice to the character
viewpoint typically requires a few sentences or even a few paragraphs to
accomplish. This is because it is first necessary for the reader to be able to
register what Hough calls the “standard [that is] set or implied by the work
itself,” before the distinctive accent of the character can be introduced. In a note
on Austen’s use of free indirect discourse as a part of her narrative strategy,
Hough also calls attention to the ideological rationale for using it:

C.S. Lewis … finds the theme of four of Jane Austen’s novels (all except Persuasion and
Mansfield Park) to be disillusionment/disenchantment – in the strict, not the popular sense
of these words; the awakening from a false view of things to seeing things as they are. If this
is to be the theme it is necessary that the illusions shall be fully presented first. If the theme
is to be presented as effectively as possible it is even necessary for a time that we shall share
in the illusions. It is here that Jane Austen’s coloured narrative assumes a greater impor-
tance. It becomes not a matter of handling but a matter of structure. (Hough 1980: 59)

As Hough implies, in third-person narration, this slippage from the narrative

voice to the character’s viewpoint and back again allows for a form of quite

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74 Terence Patrick Murphy and Kelly S. Walsh

precise authorial control over the extent of the illusions held by the central
character that the reader is asked to entertain. What is chiefly important here,
however, is that the two voices are in principle distinct: it is always possible to
distinguish the one from the other, if the reader pays careful attention to the
linguistic and stylistic clues that are offered. This is obviously a source of rich
dramatic irony for the discerning reader, even as it provides a series of ideolo-
gical traps for those readers who find themselves successfully seduced by the
idiosyncratic voice of the main character.
But what happens when this distinction is absent or suppressed as part of a
conscious authorial strategy? What happens when a narrative text lacks the
crucial distinction between a neutral narration and the various kinds of internal
deviation we associate with the onset of free indirect discourse? In what way is
the reader’s contemplation of the aesthetic whole of the story altered? And what
might be the circumstances in which an author would choose to undertake this
stylistic innovation?
In the work of Katherine Mansfield, there are a number of highly interesting
examples of this stylistic technique, in which the distinction between an objec-
tive narrative voice and a more idiosyncratic character voice cannot be so readily
drawn. In these short stories, part of the reader’s aesthetic experience consists in
coming to terms with the central character’s misplaced confidence about herself,
her judgments of other people, or her understanding of the world she inhabits.
These stories are typically marked by a measure of shock or surprise near story’s
end, the result of the dispelling of the illusion that the colored narrative has
helped to sustain throughout most of the preceding narrative.

3 “A Cup of Tea” (1922)

Mansfield’s “A Cup of Tea” (1922) offers a somewhat neglected example of this
modernist narrative technique. This short story was one of the very last in the
posthumous collection The Dove’s Nest and Other Stories, which was edited by
her husband John Middleton Murry. To date, the story has garnered a modest
amount of critical attention, although none of the previous critical work has
focused on the issue of narrative reliability (Wagenknecht 1928; Domincovich
1941; Trotter 1993; Leech and Short 2007; Hubble 2009; Butterworth-McDermott
2012). “A Cup of Tea” outlines a brief set of incidents in the life of Rosemary
Fell, a wealthy and seemingly spoiled English housewife, during the course of
one bitterly cold London afternoon. The plot proper begins with a visit to an
antique shop in Curzon Street, where the owner attempts to interest Rosemary

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 Unreliable Third Person Narration 75

in “[a]n exquisite little enamel box with a glaze so fine it looked as though it
had been baked in cream” (333). Finding the price of twenty-eight guineas a
little excessive, Rosemary asks the shop-owner to hold on to it for her; she then
goes into the street where she is stopped by “a little battered creature with
enormous eyes, someone quite young, no older than herself, who clutched at
her coat-collar with reddened hands, and shivered as though she had just
come out of the water” (334). This destitute young woman, we come to learn, is
named Miss Smith, and what she asks of Rosemary is “the price of a cup of tea”
(334). Finding all of this “extraordinary!,” Rosemary decides to take Miss Smith
home with her “to prove to this girl that – wonderful things did happen in life,
that – fairy godmothers were real, that – rich people had hearts, and that
women were sisters” (334, 335). Once home, Rosemary, becoming quickly
annoyed by Miss Smith’s crying, has tea and sandwiches served; but as she
is on the verge of questioning Miss Smith about her circumstances, Philip,
Rosemary’s husband, enters the room. Clearly perturbed, he takes Rosemary
into the library to find out who Miss Smith is, why she is in their home, and
what Rosemary plans to do with her. Rosemary responds: “Be frightfully nice
to her. Look after her” (337). Philip, after telling Rosemary, “you’re quite mad,
you know. It simply can’t be done,” adds: “she’s so astonishingly pretty” (337,
338), in what we presume is an effort to manipulate his wife into sending Miss
Smith away. Philip’s tactic works, and Rosemary dispenses with Miss Smith,
but not before giving her three pound notes by way of compensation. Half an
hour later, having done her hair and put on some makeup and jewels,
Rosemary asks Philip about the little box she saw in Curzon Street: “May I
have it?” (338). In response, Philip places “her on his knee” and says: “You
may, my little wasteful one” (338). “But,” the narrator tells us, “that was not
really what Rosemary wanted to say”: “‘Philip,’ she whispered, and she
pressed his head against her bosom, ‘am I pretty?’” (338).
With this exchange, the story concludes. We have no idea what will happen
to Miss Smith, and we are not witness to Philip’s response to his wife’s final
question. It does not seem that Rosemary has had any sort of epiphanic realiza-
tion about herself, and the patriarchal status quo would appear to have been
maintained. But while the story may seem incomplete and unresolved, a closer
look at Mansfield’s narrative technique produces significant indeterminacy that
belies the apparently simple, straightforward plot.
For Hough, as we have seen, the reader of a prose narrative, told through a
third-person narrator, expects to encounter an introductory passage in which the
facts are presented “uncoloured,” “uncontaminated either by the subjectivity of
the author or that of any of the characters” (Hough 1980: 50). Mansfield’s story,
however, opens with colored narrative:

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76 Terence Patrick Murphy and Kelly S. Walsh

Rosemary Fell was not exactly beautiful. No, you couldn’t have called her beautiful.
Pretty? Well, if you took her to pieces. … But why be so cruel as to take anyone to pieces?
She was young, brilliant, extremely modern, exquisitely well dressed, amazingly well read
in the newest of the new books, and her parties were the most delicious mixture of the
really important people and … artists – quaint creatures, discoveries of hers, some of them
too terrifying for words, but others quite presentable and amusing. (Mansfield 2006: 332,
ellipses in original)

Clearly, this opening paragraph does not follow Hough’s directives, for the
language is not, as he would have it, “unidiosyncratic” (Hough 1980: 53). From
the very first sentence, the reader is made aware that he or she is in the presence
of a rather lively, somewhat supercilious, narrator with a tendency to prevaricate.
The description of Rosemary starts with a hedging appraisal of her looks, which,
by invoking the second-person pronoun “you,” creates a zone of indeterminacy,
since the reader can interpret this sentence in one of two distinct ways: either this
represents an appeal to a conventional notion of beauty shared by narrator and
reader – or it represents an internal debate within Rosemary’s own mind. It is thus
unclear to what extent Rosemary consciously measures herself against these
standards; we might infer, however, from the conspicuous set of modifiers used
to describe Rosemary and her lifestyle, that her taste in clothing, books, and party
guests indicates a series of compensations for what is lacking elsewhere in her
life. What Hough calls the “internal relations” of the work are then already
disturbed in the first paragraph, for we are denied any standard by which to
determine what in the narration is reliable or factually true. Without a “standard
set or implied by the work itself,” the reader’s attempt to frame Rosemary as
“natural, affected, pompous or vulgar or whatnot” (Hough 1980: 64) is thwarted.
In effect, what is suppressed in “A Cup of Tea” is that careful modulation
Lodge observes in the novels of Jane Austen, whereby “the author slips from a
classic style, which values lucidity, measurement and objectivity, into one that
is marked by the stylistic peculiarities” of the main character herself (Lodge
1992: 5). And what this means is that the story’s stylistic texture is shaped by
indeterminacy, as we cannot infer, with any reliability, the extent to which the
narrative is colored, deeply or otherwise, by Rosemary’s perceptions of her own
standing in her social milieu.
A short story that begins “in medias res,” as this one does, can and usually
does turn back to offer a wider view of things, introducing the characters in a
more objective way. This is what the second paragraph of “A Cup of Tea”
appears to do with its opening sentence:

Rosemary had been married two years. She had a duck of a boy. No, not Peter–Michael.
And her husband absolutely adored her. They were rich, really rich, not just comfortably

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 Unreliable Third Person Narration 77

well off, which is odious and stuffy and sounds like one’s grandparents. But if Rosemary
wanted to shop she would go to Paris as you and I would go to Bond Street. If she wanted
to buy flowers, the car pulled up at that perfect shop in Regent Street, and Rosemary inside
the shop just gazed in her dazzled, rather exotic way, and said: “I want those and those
and those. Give me four bunches of those. And that jar of roses. Yes, I’ll have all the roses
in the jar. No, no lilac. I hate lilac. It’s got no shape.” (Mansfield 2006: 332)

Although the first sentence may be construed as reliable, there is little else in the
paragraph that adheres to this standard. In his assessment of “A Cup of Tea,”
David Trotter speaks of Mansfield using “a gossipy conversational style which
clearly mimics the idiom and intonations of Rosemary’s ‘set,’ and moves fluently
into and out of her consciousness” (Trotter 1993: 71). At one level, this seems a
shrewd assessment. The voice of the third-person narration, as we have said, is
not a traditional omniscient or neutral voice. At the same time, while the narrative
voice is certainly colored, there are sentences that cannot truly be said to belong
to Rosemary either. We can readily distinguish an objective sentence, “Rosemary
had been married two years,” from one colored by Rosemary’s viewpoint, “She
had a duck of a boy”; however, a sentence like “But if Rosemary wanted to shop
she would go to Paris as you and I would go to Bond Street” creates a zone of
indeterminacy. That is, the reader is left to determine, without any reliable
internal standards, the proportions in which the narrative utterance emerges
from Rosemary’s consciousness, “the idiom and intonations” of her “set,” and
the narrator’s presumably ironic attitude towards her character.
Something similar occurs at the beginning of the story’s third paragraph:
“One winter afternoon she had been buying something in a little antique shop in
Curzon Street” (Mansfield 2006: 332). The second sentence, while colored by
Rosemary’s attitude and perception, still seems more or less reliable, but the
third one is slightly doubtful: “It was a shop she liked. For one thing, one
usually had it to oneself” (332). In the latter sentence, the reader might detect
a lack of self-awareness, since the reason that Rosemary has the shop to herself
is presumably due to its expensiveness. From here on, the reader registers more
significant doubt: “And then the man who kept it was ridiculously fond of
serving her. He beamed whenever she came in. He clasped his hands; he was
so gratified he could barely speak. Flattery, of course. All the same, there was
something …” (332). In the next paragraph, more uncertainty is created by the
shift from the imperfect form to the past tense:

“You see, madam,” he would explain in his low respectful tones, “I love my things. I
would rather not part with them than sell them to someone who does not appreciate
them, who has not that fine feeling which is so rare …” And, breathing deeply, he
unrolled a tiny square of blue velvet and pressed it on the glass counter with his pale
finger-tips. (332–333)

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78 Terence Patrick Murphy and Kelly S. Walsh

Even though we are presented with what looks like direct speech, the modal
verb of the first sentence situates it in an habitual past, thus making it unclear if
these are the actual words he uses on this day. The sense of ambiguity is
reinforced by the shopman’s reported speech, after Rosemary asks him to hold
onto the enamel box for her:

She stared at a plump tea-kettle like a plump hen above the shopman’s head, and her
voice was dreamy as she answered: “Well, keep it for me – will you? I’ll …”
But the shopman had already bowed as though keeping it for her was all any human being
could ask. He would be willing, of course, to keep it for her for ever.
The discreet door shut with a click. (Mansfield 2006: 332–333)

This final sentence, “The discreet door shut with a click,” has been analyzed in
depth by Leech and Short, who emphasize the importance of inference in
comprehending this scene, with the “soft, unresonant” click giving the reader
“the delicately ironic impression of a deferential, high-class shop in which
doors, as it were, open and shut almost of their own accord. This is the world
of self-effacing service in which the heroine moves with assurance; even if
servitors are visible, it is not for her to notice them” (Leech and Short 2007:
102, 103). Significantly, however, Leech and Short’s analysis collapses author
and narrator into a single entity (Leech and Short 2007: 103). This has the
perhaps unintended effect of concealing the radical stylistic unreliability of the
narrative, since their assumption here is that the shopkeeper actually says that
he will keep the box forever. But to our minds, this is doubtful: if really uttered,
it runs the risk of sounding facetious. More broadly, we would question the
assumption that Rosemary moves through this world with assurance.
A way of addressing the issue of the narrative’s reliability does not come to
light until the very end. After “look[ing] at him with her dazzled exotic gaze,”
Rosemary tells Philip that “Miss Smith won’t dine with us tonight” (338).
The end of “A Cup of Tea”, comprised mostly of direct speech, reads as follow:

Philip put down the paper. “Oh, what’s happened? Previous engagement?”
Rosemary came over and sat down on his knee. “She insisted on going,” said she, “so I
gave the poor little thing a present of money. I couldn’t keep her against her will, could I?”
she added softly.
Rosemary had just done her hair, darkened her eyes a little, and put on her pearls. She put
up her hands and touched Philip’s cheeks.
“Do you like me?” said she, and her tone, sweet, husky, troubled him.
“I like you awfully,” he said, and he held her tighter. “Kiss me.”
There was a pause.
Then Rosemary said dreamily: “I saw a fascinating little box today. It cost twenty-eight
guineas. May I have it?”

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 Unreliable Third Person Narration 79

Philip jumped her on his knee. “You may, little wasteful one,” said he.
But that was not really what Rosemary wanted to say.
“Philip,” she whispered, and she pressed his head against her bosom, “am I pretty?”
(Mansfield 338)

In this final sequence, it seems that Rosemary exhibits a lack of comprehension

regarding the intent behind Philip’s comment about the beauty of Miss Smith. At
the same time, we begin to suspect that the narrator’s assertion that “her tone,
sweet, husky, troubled him,” has originated in Rosemary’s own mind. For
Hubble, this conclusion reveals that

the upper-middle-class protagonist is made simultaneously aware of her own desire and
how it functions as part of a wider economy of desire which precludes its ever being met –
a point brought home as the story closes with Rosemary’s husband pulling her onto his
knee and promising to buy her the enamel box for twenty-eight guineas even as she
realises that this is not in fact what she wants. (Hubble 2009)

In contrast, we would see the question “am I pretty?” as providing the reader
with a small shock, alerting us to the idea that Rosemary has been in part the
author of the thoughts about prettiness, with which the story begins: “Rosemary
Fell was not exactly beautiful. No, you wouldn’t have called her beautiful.
Pretty?”
What all this suggests is that the obscured relationship between the unreli-
able third-person narrator and the (norms of the) implied author has been a
stylistic effect, one colored, from the start, by the main character – something
that is essentially suppressed until the very end. To a large degree, what is
“factual” or “truthful” in the colored, third-person narrative remains uncertain;
there are moments of apparent objectivity, but we close the story knowing only
that Rosemary’s thoughts have colored the narrative more than we had sus-
pected. In a sense, what we gain is negative knowledge, and subsequent read-
ings of the story are more likely than not to increase the sense of narrative
unreliability. Our actual apprehension of the “completed artistic whole” serves
to throw into doubt our sense of the veracity of “each bit of action and suffering
of all the characters.”

4 “Bliss” (1918)
Variations on the third-person narrative technique that Mansfield uses in “A Cup
of Tea” recur in a number of stories she wrote from about the middle of the First
World War on. Each of these stories also contains a central female character who

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80 Terence Patrick Murphy and Kelly S. Walsh

appears to misunderstand either herself or her immediate circumstances. A

notable virtue of these short fictions is that unreliability itself provides a central
theme. The effect, then, is intensified using colored, third-person narration,
while often suppressing, until the very end, an important source of that coloring.
But even in revealing the central source of the narrative coloring, the ending
nonetheless denies the reader a standard that would allow for the determina-
tion, with meaningful precision, of what in the narration is reliable – and in
relation to whose norms. Instead, the stylistic effect is to heighten the reader’s
sense of how profoundly unreliable the third-person narration can be. While,
traditionally, the ending of a prose fiction has been understood as a dénouement
or unknotting, Mansfield’s circular compositions require us to reread them to
discover something we believe we may have missed the first time.
The short story “Bliss” (1918), which provided the title for Mansfield’s first
collection of short stories, provides another example of this unusual narrative
technique. Here, once again, the attempt to distinguish an objective narrative
voice from that of the central character founders on the intricacies of the open-
ing sentences of the story:

Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run
instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw
something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at – nothing – at
nothing, simply.
What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are
overcome, suddenly by a feeling of bliss – absolute bliss! – as though you’d suddenly
swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending
out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe? … (Mansfield
2006: 69)

Here, we shift almost immediately from the objective narration of “Bertha Young
was thirty,” into the free indirect discourse that comprises the rest of this
sentence, with its rephrasing of its giddy excitement, its hesitations over perhaps
meaningless gestures, its slightly anti-climatic air of only partially fulfilled
promise.2 Much as in “A Cup of Tea”, the second paragraph’s narration makes
use of the second-person pronoun, calling upon the reader to identify with

2 In her engaging study Consciousness in Modernist Fiction: A Stylistic Study (2013), Violeta
Sotirova offers a somewhat divergent analysis of these opening sentences. Sotirova suggests
that they represent a “kind of transition from free indirect style to interior monologue that
contributes to the disintegration of the classic form of free indirect style” (46). Although we
accept that there is an important shift from “the use of proximal deixis … emotive use of
parallelism … and with its syntactic breaks that interrupt the grammatical coherence of the
sentence” to the “present tense in the second and third paragraphs”, we do not feel that this

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 Unreliable Third Person Narration 81

these intensified emotional “moments” experienced by Bertha. What remains

indeterminate here is the source of the coloring and the proportion in which the
narrative is inflected by the voice of Bertha or that of her “set” and the senti-
ments, unironic or otherwise, of the narrator. For “Bliss,” too, we would argue,
the reader must read right through in order to evaluate productively both the
narrative voice and the story title standing enigmatic guard over the story’s
ending.
Of course, in “A Cup of Tea,” it might be argued that the entrance of Philip
provides a means for the discerning reader to register Rosemary’s speech as
“natural, affected, pompous or vulgar or whatnot,” and that it is Philip who
ultimately emerges as the “standard set or implied by the work itself.” It is, after
all, Philip’s matter-of-fact quizzing of his wife that ultimately leads to the
revelation of Rosemary’s concern about her prettiness. But it is not so clear
that the reader can do this reliably with what Hough terms “the speech of all the
characters.” In “Bliss,” for example, the reader’s attempt to place Bertha’s
overwhelming feelings is made more difficult because the majority of the
“smart set” who frequent her parties appear to be rather pompous and preten-
tious themselves. This is made clear with the entrance of Mr. and Mrs. Norman
Knight, an entrance which is almost entirely related through direct speech:

“ … Why! Why! Why is the middle-class so stodgy – so utterly without a sense of humour!
My dear, it’s only by a fluke that I am here at all – Norman being the protective fluke. For
my darling monkeys so upset the train that it rose to a man and simply ate me with its
eyes. Didn’t laugh – wasn’t amused – that I should have loved. No, just stared – and bored
me through and through.”
“But the cream of it was,” said Norman, pressing a large tortoiseshell-rimmed monocle into
his eye, “you don’t mind me telling this, Face, do you?” (In their home and among their
friends they called each other Face and Mug.) “The cream of it was when she, being full
fed, turned to the woman beside her and said: ‘Haven’t you ever seen a monkey before?’”
(Mansfield 2006: 73)

The playful, perhaps spiteful, perhaps self-ironic, bantering back and forth
between Mrs. and Mr. Knight is briefly interrupted by a short paragraph of
colored prose whose source remains indeterminate: “And a funnier thing still
was that now her coat was off she did look like a very intelligent monkey who
had even made that yellow silk dress out of scraped banana skins. And her
amber ear-rings: they were like little dangling nuts” (Mansfield 2006: 74).

results in Mansfield’s story in “forms that erase completely the voice of the narrator”, such as
those Sotirova correctly identifies in Woolf and Joyce (46).

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82 Terence Patrick Murphy and Kelly S. Walsh

Throughout the evening, Bertha’s sense of elation intensifies due to her

attraction to Pearl Fulton, culminating in the erotically charged moment that
they apparently share, while gazing at Bertha’s pear tree:

How long did they stand there? Both, as it were, caught in that circle of unearthly light,
understanding each other perfectly, creatures of another world, and wondering what they
were to do in this one with all this blissful treasure that burned in their bosoms and
dropped, in silver flowers, from their hair and hands?
For ever? – for a moment? And did Miss Fulton murmur: “Yes. Just that.” Or did Bertha
dream it? (Mansfield 2006: 77)

With the questions of the second paragraph, the narrator draws attention to the
indeterminacy of what we have just read: either the exchange actually happened
more or less as narrated or the narrative is mimicking what Bertha wished to
have happened. In either case, Bertha’s erotic feelings for Miss Fulton, crystal-
lized in the figure of the pear tree, are channeled into a newfound sexual desire
for her husband, Harry: “For the first time in her life Bertha Young desired her
husband” (Mansfield 2006: 78). However, all of this is dispelled when, as the
guests are leaving, Bertha witnesses Harry and Miss Fulton in an amorous
embrace. The story concludes in the following way:

“If you prefer,” said Harry’s voice, very loud, from the hall, “I can phone you a cab to come
to the door.”
“Oh, no. It’s not necessary,” said Miss Fulton, and she came up to Bertha and gave her the
slender fingers to hold.
“Good-bye. Thank you so much.”
“Good-bye,” said Bertha.
Miss Fulton held her hand a moment longer.
“Your lovely pear tree!” she murmured.
And then she was gone, with Eddie following, like the black cat following the grey cat … .
“Oh, what is going to happen now?” she cried.
But the pear tree was as lovely as ever and as full of flower and as still. (Mansfield
2006: 80)

In Hough’s terms, the theme of “Bliss” can be said to be “disillusionment” or

“disenchantment,” in “the awakening from a false view of things to seeing
things as they are.” Despite what Bertha has seen and learned, the pear tree
has not “changed in accordance with her new mood” (Head 1992: 24). Only by
looking at the story as “a completed artistic whole,” and perhaps reflecting on
the proverbial resonances of the story’s title, can the reader appreciate the
extent to which the narrative has been colored by Bertha’s illusions, illusions
that the reader has been compelled to entertain. Once again, the effect has been
produced by the deliberate suppression of clear modulation between neutral,

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 Unreliable Third Person Narration 83

objective narrative and colored narrative. It is only with the destruction of

Bertha’s “bliss” that such a standard can be judiciously applied.

5 “Revelations” (1920)
In contrast with both “A Cup of Tea” and “Bliss,” the startling discovery at the
end of Mansfield’s “Revelations” appears not to result in a greater level of self-
awareness for the central character or indicate that her life has been changed in
any significant way. Instead, it is left to the reader to recognize the degree of
self-delusion that the central character regularly enacts on her own behalf. The
first sentence introduces Monica as a somewhat spoiled thirty-three-year-old
hypochondriac: “From eight o’clock in the morning until about half-past eleven
Monica Tyrell suffered from her nerves, and suffered so terribly that these hours
were – agonising, simply” (Mansfield 2006: 151). Of this sentence, William New
argues that it “starts off as though it is rooted in specific, documentary fact” and
then “swiftly shifts into subjective approximations”:

The word “about” signals the first step away from ostensible objectivity, the repetition of
“suffered” with the addition of the intensifier “so terribly” then takes the entire sentence
out of its apparent third-person form and places it squarely within Monica’s own con-
sciousness: she’s contriving an effect – and while she aspires to the grand gesture, her
sentence ends lamely and inexactly. (New 1999: 20)

While we would take issue with his idea that the sentence ends “squarely within
Monica’s own consciousness,” New’s analysis is nicely aligned with our expla-
nation of the technical virtuosity of Mansfield’s narrative style. This is to say,
New stresses the interpretive effort that Mansfield’s intricately-created narrative
texture elicits from her readers. The language of such stories, he argues, can be
criticized as “hyperbolic sentiment or preciousness, that in isolation sound[s]
diminutive, childish or affected”; but “to read such words in isolation is to miss
the multiple effects of the texture of the arrangement, and texture is important,
for it reveals the nuances of insight and possibly willful blindness that feed and
inhibit human relationships” (New 1999: 19). A stress on the texture and the way
in which Mansfield’s unreliable third-person narration works to weave it, produ-
cing shock, ambivalence, and indeterminacy, can certainly point in an autobio-
graphical direction (Hankin 1983: 142).3 It is clear that Mansfield’s style

3 Hankin writes: The germ of Katherine’s central idea in “Bliss” … seems to have been her
own and Murry’s relationship with Ottoline Morrell. For the central theme in “Bliss” – the
betrayal of Bertha by the woman with whom she has fallen in love, and by her own husband –

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84 Terence Patrick Murphy and Kelly S. Walsh

represents an attempt to comprehend the complicated set of relations in her own

life and her complex emotional response to them. And we might see this as a
source for the complex admixture of irony and coloring in many of her stories.
Whatever the final source of that motivation, however, we must take issue with
the idea expressed by Marvin Magalaner and Edmund Volpe that Mansfield
“cannot be said to have invented a technique, founded a school, or developed
the short story art so completely that no writer who came after was able to
improve upon her contribution” (quoted in New 1999: 23). In our opinion, this is
a wholly ungenerous analysis: we argue instead that the use of unreliable third-
person fiction explored here is Mansfield’s unique contribution to the short story
genre. This form tends to highlight a strong sense of surprise or shock toward
narrative’s end, typically unmasking in the process certain central assumptions
that the main character has maintained about herself. Each of these stories also
suggests the general validity of Mick Short’s dictum: “Third-person narrators,
because they can often be assumed to be the author, are much more usually
omniscient. Hence when a third-person narrator is limited or unreliable the
effect is very heavily foregrounded” (Short 1996: 259).

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