Bliss

Significance of the title

A paradox is something which is inherently contradictory on its face, but which, after further
investigation, may turn out to be logical or true. In this story, the title, "Bliss," refers to a state of
joy and pleasure which would normally only happen when something out of the ordinary has
occurred. The paradox in this story, then, is that the protagonist, Bertha, is filled with bliss all day
to the extent that she feels "drunk," but actually nothing out of the ordinary has happened to her.
She is feeling blissful simply because of the ordinary events of her own life.
The day Mansfield describes does feature a dinner party and an encounter with a woman with
whom Bertha has "fallen in love," in a platonic sense. However, the impression given is that
these are not things which are out of the ordinary in Bertha's life. Bertha feels "drunk" and
desperate to exercise her body and take control of her own child, who is normally bequeathed to
the care of the nurse. Bertha feels awash with love for her child and, indeed, "tender" towards
the whole world without understanding why. The smallest things seem to fill her with joy; she
appreciates all of her friends and feels terribly in love with her husband and glad of the comforts
of her life. The paradox, then, is that she should feel so blissful and appreciative of her happy
life on this day for no particular reason. On this day, she unexpectedly appreciates how
privileged she is.
Katherine Mansfield's title "Bliss" is paradoxical because the protagonist Bertha feels bliss on a
very ordinary day when nothing out of the ordinary has happened to change her situation. Her
situation consists of having a husband she merely likes but is not passionate about, having a
baby she barely spends time with, having a comfortable home, and having lots of friends, yet
none of these things have ever before given her a feeling of bliss, only a feeling of contentment.
The one thing that is different is she has met yet another beautiful friend, named Pearl, whom
she had "fallen in love with," just as she always fell in love with women she thought were
beautiful and mysterious. It is possible that her feelings of jealousy of and admiration for her
friend have given her hope for developing further feelings for her husband, and she is
interpreting this hope as a feeling of bliss. Sadly, since she can neither fully identify what her
feeling of bliss is nor express it because she feels she must suppress it, by the end of the story,
she no longer has her feeling of bliss, which further underscores the paradox created by the
title, a paradox that presents truth since suppression of feelings certainly does lead to a loss of
feelings.
Since Bertha is unable to identify exactly why she feels bliss, she projects her feeling of bliss
onto multiple objects and people. For instance, she projects her feelings onto the centerpiece of
a bowel of fruit she has just created, onto her child, onto her friend Pearl, and finally onto her
husband, whom she says she "[f]or the first time in her life, ... desired." She even wonders if her
feeling of bliss was stimulated by her growing desires for her husband. However, she
suppresses her feeling of bliss by preventing herself from telling her husband about her feelings,
keeping herself from laughing, and by talking as much as possible throughout the evening. Her
difficulties in identifying her reasons for her feeling of bliss and of expressing her feeling
because her feeling is not genuine show us that she is a character in a situation that is difficult
to reconcile, which shows us she is in a paradoxical situation.
Her lack of genuine feeling of bliss is further revealed when, by the end of the story, she draws
the conclusion her husband is having an affair with Pearl, a conclusion that shatters her feeling
of bliss and leaves her with the same ordinary feelings she has had every day. The contradiction
between the title of the story and the story's outcome further develops the paradox, and it is a
contradiction that makes perfect sense to the reader since a person will lose a feeling of bliss
when the feeling is either not genuine or is suppressed.
The tension between the title and the theme of "Bliss" is more apparent than actual; the paradox
comes from how Mansfield handles the complexity so gracefully. The bliss Bertha experiences
is also quite literally ecstasy: ec-stasis. Bertha is lifted out of her norm, her place, and her habits
by the feeling. This is what opens her to the possibility of new and potentially transformative
desire for her husband. However, when one rises out of one's normal position, one sees and
experiences new things, and that's what happens when she sees her husband with Pearl. To put
it more simply, bliss destroys contentment.

Symbols

Pear Tree
Bliss’, like much modernist fiction, is marked by its use of ambiguous symbolism: symbols
whose meanings appear multifaceted and hard to pin down. And central to the story is the
symbol of the pear-tree, which recurs at numerous points throughout ‘Bliss’.

If the ‘tall, slender’ shape of the pear tree suggests the physique of a woman, the fruit itself
denotes the female genitals (especially the uterus) while also carrying connotations of the
fruitful, fertile, juicy, and voluptuous.

Of course, apple trees usually take us to the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis (according
to a long-standing tradition; the Bible doesn’t mention apples in relation to the tree), and
pear-trees carry something of this association, without being as blatant or direct as if Mansfield
had used an apple-tree to suggest temptation, a loss of innocence, or carnal knowledge.

Bertha is quick to associate the pear-tree with herself: she sees ‘the lovely pear tree with its
wide open blossoms as a symbol of her own life.’ But why she detects such symbolism is not
explained; it’s possible that there is some linguistic association at work (‘pear’ is so near to
‘Pearl’, the name of the woman she is attracted to, in ways which surprise her), although the
symbolism and associations already mentioned doubtless play a part.

At the end of the story, Mansfield strengthens this ‘pear = Pearl’ association when she tells us
that ‘the pear tree was as lovely as ever and as full of flower and as still.’ It remains unchanged,
and untouched: Bertha’s evening with Pearl has not altered that. If the pear-tree is a symbol of
her own life, it is full of flowering potential and yet remains ‘still’: its beauty has not been fully
awakened, and it has not been (to coin a phrase) deflowered.
Cats
A key theme of ‘Bliss’ is marriage, and Bertha’s unhappy marriage to Harry raises questions
about the role of female desire in a largely loveless or at least sexless marriage. At a couple of
points in the story, Mansfield draws our attention to a pair of cats seen in the garden.
Bertha’s distaste for this scene, as one cat follows behind the other, stalking it but also walking
in its shadow, suggests that on some level she also sees in the cats a reflection of her own life.
Is she the black cat (black cats, lest we forget, often associated with witches in European
folklore: those faithful companions of unmarried women who stepped outside the bounds of
acceptable society), following in the ‘shadow’ of her husband?
At the end of the story, when Pearl leaves the dinner party, the cats are mentioned again, with
their movements mirroring the two human figures, Eddie Warren and Pearl: ‘And then she was
gone, with Eddie following, like the black cat following the grey cat.’ Now, Pearl has become the
grey cat and Eddie the black cat, but once again, one character is following in the shadow of
another.
It isn’t easy to say what we are to make of this cat-symbolism. In the first mention of the cats,
they are described as ‘intent’ and ‘quick’, with the grey cat ‘dragging its belly’ as it moves,
suggesting the stalking of prey. Is the black cat, in turn, stalking it? Is the grey cat sexual prey,
much as Eddie Warren appears to stalk the beautiful Pearl at the end of the story?
It’s worth bearing in mind that both mentions of the grey cat and the black cat come just after the
pear-tree has been mentioned: the first time, it is just after the ‘slender pear tree in fullest,
richest bloom’ is introduced; the second time, it is immediately after Pearl’s parting comment to
Bertha: ‘Your lovely pear-tree!’

The pear-tree, in standing in the garden and being ‘lovely’, suggests paradise, a kind of Edenic
world. But the two cats are a blot on this paradisal landscape. Of course, it was a serpent or
snake that sowed trouble in the Garden of Eden, not a cat; but the grey cat’s action of ‘dragging
its belly’ curiously recalls the punishment God meted out to the serpent following its successful
temptation of Adam and Eve.
Just as the pear-tree stands in for the apple-tree associated with the Fall of Man and the
Garden of Eden, so the cat dragging its belly stands in for the serpent, and performs a similar
function: symbolically, it suggests the threat to paradise that lurks within the garden.

Moonlight
Moonlight represents transformation and illusion in the story. Bertha sees the moon rising when
she is looking out at the pear tree before the dinner party and associates this with the
transformative potential of the evening, which she believes will bring about some change in her
life and lead to the fulfilment of her hidden desire for Pearl Fulton. The moon continues to have
a transformative effect over the evening: when Eddie Warren arrives, he complains that the
moonlight has made his socks whiter and transformed his taxi driver into a “sinister” and
“timeless” figure whom Eddie was afraid would kidnap him in an “eternal taxi.” Pearl is also
associated with the moon: dressed all in silver, she has a pearl-like appearance reflective of her
name and similar to the white glow of the moon. This represents the idea that Pearl herself has
had a transformative effect upon Bertha’s life, just as the moon has transformed the night
outside and made ordinary things seem mysterious and extraordinary. It is Pearl’s presence
which is responsible for Bertha’s feeling of “bliss,” which has transformed the world around her
and made her feel “tender” towards everything and everyone. However, just as the moonlight
has had an artificial effect upon the appearance of the taxi driver and made him appear like an
“eternal” creature, Pearl’s affinity with how Bertha feels also proves to be an illusion. It is
revealed that Pearl is, in fact, having an affair with Bertha’s husband Harry. As such, it is likely
that her friendliness towards Bertha is a means to allow Pearl to spend time with Harry while
deflecting suspicion.

Feminism in Bliss

But Mansfield brought something else to the modernist table; not just a questioning of the nature
of truth and reality, but an appreciation of the crucial role of gender. One of the key assumptions
that Mansfield, and other female modernists, challenged was the habit of presenting narrative
fiction through male eyes and according to male values. This had implications not just for her
outlook, but for her narrative style too.

Katherine Mansfield’s writings suggest a sense of personal truth; a subjective truth based on
female experience in a society where women were still marginalised. In terms of form,
Mansfield explored these ideas through the short story. This was partly because her writing
career was cut tragically short by her early death, but also because this form gave her a
structure within which to polish her characters and experiment in form. Indeed, some critics go
so far as to suggest the short story format is particularly suited to writers exploring a feminist
world view.

Many of Mansfield’s short stories focus on those estranged or isolated by society, in particular
women. Bliss is about a young woman struggling to understand her own newly discovered
sexuality, Miss Brill concerns an impoverished, lonely spinster and Pictures a struggling singer
who is forced to turn to prostitution. Mansfield wrote at a time when women, and some men,
were questioning traditional gender roles. The movement for women’s suffrage was demanding
political equality, the spread of psychoanalytical theories increasingly gave a conceptual
framework to female sexuality and writers such as Mansfield, Woolf and Richardson were
asserting that they had a voice which needed to be heard.

As a writer, Katherine Mansfield was particularly interested in exploring female identity and
sexuality. Many of her female characters – Bertha Young in Bliss, Ada Moss in Pictures and
Miss Brill in the short story of that name – are represented as experiencing a crisis of identity.
Indeed, in many cases Mansfield’s female characters can be said to have a fragmented identity,
suggesting they are experiencing a struggle to integrate their internal and external selves within
the strictures of a male-dominated society. In common with other modernist writers, Mansfield
focussed on her characters’ internal life rather than the external world.

Although she generally wrote using a third-person narrative, she is able to shift in and out of the
minds of her characters and consistently succeeds in revealing their psychological state.
Mansfield used symbolism to give the reader insights into the psychological state of her
characters; she used evocative images rather than analytical description. Her short stories are
full of these symbols: the pear tree and the cat in Bliss, the fox-fur wrap in Miss Brill and the
glove in A Dill Pickle.

Mansfield’s most successful short stories, such as Bliss, have a palpable sense of intensity and
power. Her stories are a triumph of style, challenging nineteenth century realism and
overcoming the conventional constraints of plot, sequential development and conclusion.
Although she was perhaps not central to the modernist movement, Mansfield shared the
determination of others, such as Woolf and Joyce, to develop new ways of seeing and
describing. In a way similar to contemporaneous changes in the visual arts, Mansfield’s short
stories concentrate on communicating moods, impressions and transient emotions.

The key to many of Mansfield’s short stories is the moment of epiphany; the point at which the
character achieves a degree of self-realisation. But this realisation rarely leads to happiness. In
A Dill Pickle, for instance, Vera is devastated when she suddenly realises that her former lover,
although he is clearly vain and self-opinionated, understands her far better than she
understands herself. Or in Bliss, in a moment of aching poignancy, Bertha’s sexual awakening is
quickly followed by her discovery of her husband’s infidelity with Miss Fulton. Her pain is
expressed by Mansfield’s use of unplayed music as a symbol. Bertha is an instrument eager to
be played for the first time:

Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?

Mansfield’s characters live in a world where options for women are limited. Women, in particular
the middle-class women that Mansfield was most familiar with, could be daughters or wives; or
perhaps left in the socially inferior state of spinsterhood. In between a woman being dependent
on her parents and, later, on her husband was a carefully regulated process of courtship.
Independence and a career was rarely an option. Married women, unless exceptionally poor, did
not go out to work. Schoolteachers had to give up their career upon marriage. Society accepted
the working spinster, but not the working wife.

In Bliss, Mansfield presents a society where married women exist in a subordinate position to
their husband and where male hypocrisy is the norm. The adulterous husband, Harry, is
confident in his dominant position in the marital household. He turns back to his wife, Bertha,
after having escorted his lover to the door at the end of a dinner party, still ‘extravagantly cool
and collected’.

Rosemary Fell is the rich, bored married woman in A Cup of Tea. Unlike Bertha Young, we learn
nothing in the story of her sexuality or the extent of her husband’s fidelity. In some ways, she
stands outside the bonds restricting less privileged women of her time. She is:
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

However, we learn that Rosemary has anxieties of her own. She worries about how she looks –
about whether she fits the male definition of an attractive woman. She at first enjoys the
adventure of picking up a young woman, Miss Smith, in Curzon Street when she asks her for
money to buy a cup of tea. She takes her home, feeds her and promises to take care of her: ‘I’ll
look after you.’ However, once Rosemary realises that her husband, Philip, has noticed that
Miss Smith is attractive, Rosemary quickly dismisses her. In spite of all her material advantages,
Rosemary seems to fear that her husband’s interest in her is only fleeting and dependent on her
looks. At the conclusion of the story, once Miss Smith has gone, she asks her husband the
question on her mind:

‘Philip,’ she whispered, and she pressed his head against her bosom, ‘am I pretty?

Bliss is Mansfield’s best known exposition of female sexuality. The story opens with Bertha
Young’s sudden and growing awareness of her own sensuality as she walks home along the
street. At first there is a suggestion that this is a spiritual state, but it is quickly revealed as
repressed sexual desire. Upon arriving home, she tries to find an outlet for these new feelings
by arranging the fruit that has been delivered for that evening’s dinner party. Mansfield
describes this process lovingly and sensually:

There were tangerines and apples stained with strawberry pink. Some yellow pears, smooth as
silk, some white grapes covered with a silver bloom and a big cluster of purple ones.

Bertha stands back to admire her work:

she stood away from the table to get the effect – and it really was most curious. For the dark
table seemed to melt into the dusky light and the glass dish and the blue bowl to float in the air.
This, of course in her present mood, was so incredibly beautiful. . . She began to laugh.

Still struggling to understand these new feelings, Bertha goes to the nursery, feeling the need to
show her affection for her child. But soon, the nurse hustles her away and Bertha continues to
prepare for the dinner party. At the party, Bertha feels drawn to Pearl Fulton, her pretty and
stylish new friend. She shows Pearl the pear tree in the garden. Standing at the window of the
drawing room together, she experiences a sense of silent, intimate communion with Pearl:

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?
But Bertha represses any physical feelings she may have for Pearl and realises, for perhaps the
first time, that she desires her husband. But Bertha’s ‘bliss’ is soon thwarted. Having embraced
the idea of both a more intimate friendship with Pearl Fulton and stronger physical relationship
with her husband, Bertha’s hopes in both directions are dashed when she realises that Pearl
and Harry are having an affair with each other and that she is excluded from intimacy with both.
Some critics, such as Merja Makinen, have questioned Mansfield’s portrayal of female sexuality
in Bliss. Having recognised her own sexuality, even to the extent of threatening to overcome the
norm of the passive female, Bertha is pushed back into a corner where married women have
very little say in how they express their sexuality.

But unmarried women fare no better in Mansfield’s short stories. In Miss Brill, for instance, she
creates a bleak portrait of an impoverished, lonely spinster. Miss Brill’s habitual Sunday rituals
help maintain her sense of identity:

They were all on the stage. They weren’t only the audience, not only looking on; they were
acting. Even she had a part and came every Sunday. No doubt somebody would have noticed if
she hadn’t been there; she was part of the performance after all. How strange she’d never
thought of it like that before!

She convinces herself that she is part of a community of people who visit the park every
weekend; but her illusion is shattered by the hostility of a young couple who mock her:

Why does she come here at all – who wants her? Why doesn’t she keep her silly old mug at
home?

Miss Brill’s precarious sense of identity and sexuality is embodied in the mangy fox fur wrap she
wears:

Dear little thing! It was nice to feel it again. She had taken it out of its box that afternoon, shaken
out the moth-powder, given it a good brush, and rubbed the life back into the dim little eyes.

When Miss Brill returns home from the park, chastened by her confrontation with the young
couple, all her lonely sadness seems to be embodied into the fox wrap:

She unclasped the necklet quickly; quickly, without looking, laid it inside. But when she put the
lid on she thought she heard something crying.

In Pictures, Mansfield represents a female central character not even able to hide behind a
mask of genteel poverty of the kind projected by Miss Brill. Ada Moss is a singer, out of work
and penniless, she lives in a dingy top-floor bedsit for which she struggles to pay the rent. Even
her looks, which once brought her regular work on the stage, are fading:

She flung off the bedclothes, and sitting on the side of the bed, furious and shivering, she stared
at her fat white legs with the great knots of greeny-blue veins.
Without the respectability and relative material security provided by being attached to a man,
she must sell herself at an endless and dispiriting round of agents and auditions. The story
presents a snapshot of one such day, when the rent is overdue and she cannot find work. Tired
and in despair, she meets a man in a café and goes off with him, seemingly to sell the only thing
she has of her own for the money to pay her rent:

Five minutes later the stout gentleman heaved himself up. ‘Well, am I goin’ your way, or are you
comin’ mine?’ he asked. ‘I’ll come with you, if it’s all the same,’ said Miss Moss. And she sailed
after the little yacht out of the café.

Mansfield’s short stories present a bleak picture of life for women in early twentieth-century
England. For married women, even those from the middle classes, life frequently brings
alienation, powerlessness and sexual frustration. For single women, their social position makes
them even more vulnerable to exploitation by men and often brings loneliness and poverty.

Power and Alienation

As a modernist writer, Katherine Mansfield developed new ways of seeing, interpreting and
recording the world around her. Her short stories demonstrate a determination to move away
from narrative forms dominated by the all-wise, authoritarian, almost exclusively male, writers of
previous generations and to write in a way that represents, in a direct manner, the feelings and
responses of her characters. Mansfield was not a political writer, but her stories are rooted in the
social, cultural and political upheavals of her time.

Concepts of alienation were by no means new at the time Mansfield was writing – Karl Marx
developed the concept into a radical and secularized critique of society. He focussed, in
particular, on the alienation of the working class under capitalism. Sigmund Freud took notions
of estrangement into the personal realm, focussing in particular on human sexuality. He
highlighted the problem of the split between the conscious and unconscious personality.
Repressed or unacknowledged desires, Freud argued, were the chief cause of psychological
illness. Repressed sexuality is a frequent theme in Mansfield’s short stories; most notably in
Bliss.

Bliss makes no direct reference to the suffrage campaign nor to contemporary demands for
women’s equality. However, it clearly represents Mansfield’s expression of the subordination of
women; a subordination that gave rise to these movements.

Beneath the superficial contentment and material comfort of Bertha’s life, Mansfield portrays a
smouldering sense of alienation. She shows the reader a society where women are estranged
from their own bodies and from any expression of their sexuality. Bertha struggles to come to
terms with her new-found sense of her own sexuality, the ‘bliss’ of the title. We get to know
nothing of the origin of this new feeling in Bertha. Her reactions to it are complex – she both
embraces it and fears it:
It was almost unbearable. She hardly dared to breathe for fear of fanning it higher, and yet she
breathed deeply, deeply.

She is alienated from her body and Mansfield describes her attempts to find external channels
to express her new desires – fruit, her child, a pear tree in the garden – before Bertha comes to
the conclusion that it is her husband, Harry, that she desires:

At those last words something strange and almost terrifying darted into Bertha’s mind. And this
something blind and smiling whispered to her: ‘Soon these people will go. The house will be
quiet – quiet. The lights will be out. And you and he will be alone together in the dark room – the
warm bed . . .

But this is a false epiphany: the evening ends with the shattering of Bertha’s dream when she
overhears Harry arranging a meeting with Miss Fulton. All she is left with is the pear tree in the
garden and seemingly no legitimate outlet for her bliss. Harry, on the other hand, holds the
power within their marriage and is able to maintain respectability, an ordered home and children
with Bertha whilst at the same time enjoying sexual fulfilment outside that marriage with Pearl
Fulton.

But Pearl’s position is perhaps even more precarious than Bertha’s. She relies on her youth and
looks – qualities which are by their very nature ephemeral – to attract powerful men such as
Harry. Both women are united in a common need to rely on men to give them their sense of self;
to feel a sense of purpose.

At the time that Mansfield was writing, Freud was developing his psychoanalytical theories in
Vienna. Analysing the social and sexual relationships of the time, he asserted that neurotic
symptoms were the product of an unresolved conflict between unconscious impulses and
conscious ones. The repression of one’s sexual feelings, which society of that time demanded
of all, but especially of women, lay at the root of what Freud called ‘hysteria’ or what, currently,
we would call mental health problems.

Bliss is arguably Mansfield’s most accomplished work. She presents a surface story of a day in
Bertha Young’s life. However, beneath this she incorporates more sombre tones which, through
suggestion rather than exposition, question the nature of Bertha’s new found feelings. As the
story unfolds, Mansfield confirms her credentials as a modernist writer by her skilful combining
of incident, image, symbol, and structure. These subtly point to the socially-determined
obstacles which hamper Bertha’s expression of her ‘bliss’.

A Dill Pickle also explores this area of the power relationships between men and women. Vera
and the unnamed male protagonist of the story were once lovers. After a six year hiatus they
meet again in a café; whether by chance or arrangement we are not told. A Dill Pickle is typical
of many of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories in that it seems to start in the middle; the reader
is not told what happened before the story starts, nor what comes after. Although the story is
told from Vera’s viewpoint, we learn very little about her. The man, on the other hand, although
un-named, provides a great deal of detail about himself.

Vera and her former lover reminisce about the time they spent together. He has clearly
prospered since the end of their relationship:

Now he had the air of a man who has found his place in life, and fills it with a confidence and
assurance which was, to say the least, impressive. He must have made money, too. His clothes
were admirable, and at that moment he pulled a Russian cigarette case out of his pocket.

Vera, on the other hand has gone down in the world since they parted; her beloved piano has
gone: ‘sold, ages ago’, and she no longer has time for music. As a woman alone in a male
society, a woman with a past, she struggles to make a living. With only thinly disguised glee, he
highlights the power imbalance that prosperity has created between them. She fascinates him
still, but he is no longer in her thrall. He makes a point of reminding her of the letter she wrote to
him at the end of their relationship:

I’ve often thought how I must have bored you. And now I understand so perfectly why you wrote
to me as you did – although at the time that letter nearly finished my life. I found it again the
other day, and I couldn’t help laughing as I read it. It was so clever – such a true picture of me.

With carefully chosen anecdotes, he parades a world of travel and the fine things of life before
Vera. He confesses he was ‘such a kid’ before, but now he seeks to impress her with the
wisdom and sophistication he has gained. Vera is tempted, but the balance of power between
them has clearly shifted. She leaves swiftly and without a word, as if trying to snatch at some
last remnant of her dignity. Although the man’s crushing sense of his own self-importance is
made clear, Mansfield also suggests a hint of egotism on Vera’s part too.

The latter decades of the nineteenth-century saw major changes in the rights of women to keep
their own earnings and inherited wealth through the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870
and 1882. Further advances were made in the early twentieth century through changes to
custody and guardianship law and the introduction of universal suffrage. However, Katherine
Mansfield was able to demonstrate, through her short stories, that women throughout this period
were kept in an almost universally subordinate position to men. Mansfield’s achievement was
made, not through polemic, but through the creation of stories containing characters of great
psychological depth; characters with a tangible inner life