Katherine Mansfield

During Persephone Reading Week I started to read Katherine Mansfield's Journal and realised that to truly appreciate it I needed to reread those Katherine Mansfield short stories I have loved and read those that are to me. Mansfield has been a popular blog topic in the last couple of weeks and I was inspired to pick up one of my volumes of her stories. Upon doing so I wanted to reread "Bliss".

"Bliss" reminds me of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. ‘I was jealous of her writing. The only writing I have ever been jealous of,’ so said Virginia Woolf of her friend, contemporary and rival Katherine Mansfield, but only as a posthumous accolade; before Mansfield’s death their relationship was fraught with bitterness and envy. Such a self-deprecating and modest admission to make when one is the female writer at the forefront of the Modernist movement. To read now, that Woolf was jealous of a contemporary’s talent, is as startling as reading the same of Shakespeare. Woolf was the most innovative in style, influential in feminism and literary mode, and as equally famous and infamous of all female writers from the twentieth-century, if not the literary canon. Yet, she was envious of Mansfield; perhaps if the latter had lived to realise her potential , instead of dying tragically young, she would now have held this mantle.

She would certainly be worthy of doing so; her writing and use of language is stunning and her stories each perfected pieces of art. I love her short stories and I have a love-hate relationship with the medium; Katherine Mansfield see-saws heavily on the love side.

I was first introduced to Katherine Mansfield by a beloved English teacher at school who gave us "The Doll House" to read, which remains one of my favourite short stories because of its apparent simplicity yet also inexplicable quality. Mansfield often features details and symbols that resonate within the reading but elude definition; the reader is unable to full grasp the significant meaning of the symbol as with the pear tree in "Bliss" and the little lamp in "The Doll's House", not strictly symbolic as they are not representative of a specific thing but freely open to interpretation, like Woolf's lighthouse, which she meant "nothing by".

Mansfield often employs abrupt beginnings that jar - the reader has to be alert and questioning from the outset, sometimes they even begin with a conjunction. She disposes of tedious descriptions/back story and launches into the midst of the action. Mansfield prompts examination at level of the word: semiotics, word choice and syntax. In "Bliss" she begins in medias res:

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? ...

Immediately I questioned who is Bertha and why is she so blissful? The word bliss and its derivatives are repeated and emphasised throughout the story and begin to describe a sexual awakening and longing for her husband, her best friend. Bertha is brimming over with emotion, desire and the search for fulfillment, a rite of passage that comes to realisation "For the first time in her life Bertha Young desired her husband." Mostly I hoped Bertha would remain in her blissful state but predicted that in the denouement she would be crushed and she is... by an ironic blow.

You can read "Bliss" online here. Please do or alternatively read a volume of her stories.