Bliss is a modernist short story by Katherine Mansfield, first published in 1920. It was first published in the English Review in August 1918 and later reprinted in Bliss and Other Stories.[1]
Contents |
The story follows a day in the life of its main character, Bertha, in Hampstead, London. She feels blissful and experiences her whole existence as perfect while at the same time seeming childish and naive. On this particular day, Bertha has invited friends for dinner. The dinner guests are characterized as shallow and vain by their small talk. At the end of the story, when the guests leave, Bertha discovers that her husband is having an affair with one of her dinner guests, Pearl Fulton..
Pearl is positively characterized by Bertha's thoughts and feelings towards her. Harry seemingly despises her, but since the story is told through the eyes of Bertha, the reader is incapable of seeing Harry's deceit. Bertha possibly has homoerotic feelings towards Pearl, as she reckons that it is Pearl who seems to inspire the bliss within her, and also the newfound sexual desire towards her own husband. These thoughts induce the reader to ponder on the implications of being homosexual in the early 20th century.
Bertha sees the blooming pear tree in the garden as a symbol of her happiness and her friendship with Pearl. However, when Bertha's mood changes rapidly in the end, the tree remains the same, showing the error in Bertha's perception of a connection. ("But the pear tree was as lovely as ever and as full of flower and as still.")
The pear tree has also been described as phallic in nature and referring to Harry himself; at one point the pear tree is said to be growing towards the moon, the moon having been compared to Pearl at an earlier point in the story. This is said to potentially symbolize Harry's lust for Pearl.
The title 'Bliss' may imply a larger irony by Mansfield: the main character Bertha is a woman concerned with material perfection, and an innocence about not only the external world but her internal world as well. She comments on her feelings towards her husband as those of a friend, but when thinking of her new friend Pearl she feels for the first time a sexual lust, but unable to look deeper in to these feelings she is having and without the vocabulary to express it, she turns from her own feelings, pushing them back to focus her energy on the materialism of her dinner party. As Mansfield brings us through the story perhaps she wants us to feel as shocked by the realization of the affair as Bertha, that 'ignorance is bliss'. But that it is our choice whether or not we wish to live in ignorance, or dive deeper into ourselves even if it scares us to discover what we find there. The last lines of this story are also immensely important as well, Pearl's line “your lovely Pear tree” echoes in the reader's mind, who is she referring to- Harry and the affair she had with him, or Bertha and flirtation between them, or perhaps Pearl (like Mansfield herself) is bisexual and referring to them both.
|
|||||