Bliss, Katherine Mansfield Textual Analysis

Katherine Mansfield’s Modern narrative tradition developed from the conjunction of outward experience and inner necessity – distinguishing her radical characterisation and phenomenological aesthetics. Reactionary to tumultuous cultural forces including industrialisation, urbanisation and the Great War, Ezra Pound’s imperative “Make it new” (1934, as cited in Stanton, 2022) attempted to challenge the successes prophesised for Modernity in the late-Victorian era. Modern short story; Bliss (Mansfield, 1920) sophisticatedly reframes mankind’s arguably unanswered search for the meaning of life through enigmatic portraits of individuals. Employing an experimental avantgarde style, her vignette renders a fragmented, spatiotemporal displacement and acts as a cultural mimesis of Modern psychoanalysis. Hailed as Modernism’s “most iconic, most representative writer” (Kimber & Wilson, 2009, as cited in Trotter, 2013, p. 21), Mansfield’s dazzling characterisation and style is achieved through the composer’s intimate relationship with the world.

Valorising the complex interiority of Modern characterisation, Mansfield’s imitable style effectively examines the fragmentation, alienation and equivocation of a confounding human consciousness. Adopting “the newly fashionable [psychoanalytic] Freud theory” (Cornut-Gentille D'Arcy, 1999, p. 245), Mansfield’s experimental, free indirect discourse “What can you do if you are thirty and…you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss” (1920, para. 2) and stream-of-consciousness techniques – privy protagonist; Bertha’s inner quest and disillusionment within a 1920 milieux. Emblematic of this morally vacuous society, the third person “narrated monologue” (Wilk, 2006, as cited in Nash, 2021) in preterit “really – really – she had everything” (Mansfield, 1920, para. 51) constructs an unconventional, limited perspective through implicit character depictions. Bertha, ostensibly epitomising the wealthy housewife with “an adorable baby…money…house…garden…and friends” (para. 55) in the introduction, gradually descends into the dislocating hysteria symptomatic of middle-class, phallocentric femininity. Symbolically and repetitively “shut up like a rare, rare fiddle” (para. 3) Bertha Young’s entrapment expresses a multivalent “doubleness” (Cornut-Gentille D'Arcy, 1999, p. 244) – her regression to an infantile impotence as echoed in her namesake and the simultaneous role of “author as human being, as wife, as woman and as emotional and intellectual entity…in the story” (Magalaner, 1978, p. 414). Avantgarde allusions to “Table d’Hote” (Mansfield, 1920, para. 144), “Why Must it Always be Tomato Soup” (para. 144) and the “absurd” (para. 14) synecdochisation of Pearl through Harry’s “shameless passion for…the white flesh of lobster…green pistachio ices…nuts…fruit” (para. 106) cumulatively “expresses a more specialised [Modern] perversity” (Magalaner, 1978, p. 417) in overconsumption. Mansfield’s contextual involvement within the Bloomsberry Group and exposure to multivalent narration including ‘To the Lighthouse’ (Woolf, 1927) and Tchekhov’s temporal fragmentation (n.d., as cited in Gnomes, n.d.), fashioned her ambiguous characterisations which “teases…provokes” readers “to fill in her ellipses”(Kaplan, 1991, p. 151, as cited in Cornut-Gentille D'Arcy, 1999, p. 250). This insignificant quotidian “of people coming to dinner” (Mansfield, 1920, para. 44) emphasises the arbitrariness of “bliss” (para. 2), while Mansfield’s minimalist style deliberately undermines Romantic expectations of heroic protagonist, exemplified through Leopold Bloom’s characterisation in Ulysses (1920). Radically opposing Eliot’s poetic theory that writing is “an escape from personality” (1919, para. 1) parallels can be drawn between the intermingled triad relations of Bertha, Harry and Pearl and Katherine and Murray Mansfield and long-time friend Ida Baker. Bertha’s heterotopia, as characterised by Mansfield’s authorial introspection and London’s cultural ebullition subtly constructs a “half-epiphany” (How to Write Like Katherine Mansfield, 2018, para. 89) of “how idiotic civilisation was” (Mansfield, 1920, para. 3). Further rejecting the conventional dramatic structure of Freytag’s Pyramid (1863, as cited in Russon, 2022) and Aristotle’s plot bound by a “beginning and middle and end”(330BCE, para. 31); the greatness of Mansfield’s characterisation lies in Bertha’s perpetual state of disequilibrium. Mansfield’s elusive protagonist thus acts as the conjugate of Modern tradition and subjective experience.

Explicitly rejecting the constraints of reality, Mansfield’s intense interest in craft and Avant-garde style is distinctly informed by Modernism’s occupation with phenomenological aesthetics. Creating the “basic impetus for artistic and literary Modernism” (Clarke & Henderson, 1917, as cited in Trotter, 2013, p. 21), late nineteenth century theories of electromagnetism and thermodynamics are actualised through Mansfield’s fractured, unreliable narrator, shifting in perspective from “I must laugh or die” (Mansfield, 1920, para. 107) to second person complacencies “what can you do” (para. 2). This vignette style which extensively details diurnal symbols of “tangerines…apples…strawberry…pears…white grapes…purple ones” (para. 14) through detailed paragraphs nuancedly forges the Modern “irrationality of the human mind” (Cornut-Gentille D'Arcy, 1999, p. 251). Semiotic discourse in ‘Bliss’ also influenced by Saussure’s concept of language (1974, as cited in Russon, 2022), contrasts Bertha’s pure “white” (Mansfield, 1920, para. 14) dress to Harry and Pearl’s monochromatic symbols of “the black cat following the grey cat” (para. 159) - emblematic of a degenerative Modern epoch. Bertha’s underlying satirical, ironic tone, ridiculing Norman Knight’s “most amusing orange coat” (para. 60) dualistically perpetuates Mansfield’s own aversions of a morally vapid, Bohemian world. Her unique bicameral narrative structure sophisticatedly critiques hierarchal constructs, juxtaposing Bertha’s proleptic bliss on the street to her repetitive “quite dizzy, quite drunk” (para. 57) spatio-temporal displacement and limitations within the domesticated home. Writing the story one week after experiencing a haemorrhage, Mansfield’s intentional elongation of narrative time over one evening and construction of a “cumulative epiphany” (How to Write Like Katherine Mansfield, 2018, para. 89) reflects Mansfield’s Modern realisation that a full life accepts the value and magnitude of a singular moment. The reoccurring motif of the “lovely pear tree” (Mansfield, 1920, para. 158) holds multivalent and vast connotations “as a symbol of her own life” (para. 55): challenging perceptions of Bertha’s spiritual malaise through allusions to the Genesis Creation Story, a metonym for Mansfield’s homoerotic longing and embodying the fugacity and continuity of momentary passions. Expanding beyond ontological themes, the final image of “the pear tree…as full of flower and as still” (para. 164) is representative not only of Bertha’s personal malaise, but the “logical result” of an ambiguous Modern zeitgeist. Admired by the “insightful and jealous” Woolf (1919, as cited in Gnomes, n.d.) for the “skill with which…[she] handled the perfectly minimal material” (Eliot, 1922, as cited in Gilligan, n.d) , Mansfield’s narrative style arose from literary tradition.

Ultimately, it is through the intermingling of authoritative and literary circumstance that narrative techniques dualistically engage with and are influenced by their tradition. Mansfield’s preoccupation with Modern characterisation and vivid style in Bliss acts as a contextual mimesis of a radically intellectualising age. Deepening understandings of the Modern consciousness and aestheticism, Mansfield’s writing sophisticatedly transcends not only time, but para-dynamic contexts.

Reference List

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