Bliss

Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss was written in 1918. The story is about a woman named Bertha who pretends to have the perfect life with her family and wealth, but she is really miserable. “Almost everything Mansfield wrote was autobiographical in some way. A reader should know about Mansfield's life because often she does not make clear where her stories are set” (Seoule). Mansfield wrote some aspects of her own life in her fictional characters like Bertha in “Bliss,” including her love life, marriage, sexuality, personality, and her love for nature.

It has been said about Mansfield that her “creative years were burdened with loneliness, illness, jealousy, alienation - all this reflected in her work with the bitter depiction of marital and family relationships of her middle-class characters” (Books and Writers). That is true, especially in her story “Bliss.” Bertha is a middle class character, who feels lonely being around tons of people at a dinner party and has a troubled marriage.

“Mansfield once described in a letter two of the things that make her write. One is ‘joy.’ She said she feels joy when in ‘some perfectly blissful way’ she is ‘at peace.’ At that time, ‘something delicate and lovely seems to open before my eyes, like a flower without thought of a frost.’ Her second motive is almost the opposite: ‘not hate or destruction . . . but an extremely deep sense of hopelessness, of everything doomed to disaster, almost willfully, stupidly.’ She summed up her second motive as ‘a cry against corruption. . . . in the widest sense of the word’" (Seoule). These were Mansfield’s reasons fro writing her “Bliss” story and how much in detail she describes the house and the pear tree in her writing, while her main character, Bertha’s life is falling apart before her very eyes.

“Although Mansfield's observations are sharp, and although she is relentless in her parodies of the modern, artistic people who populate the world of the Youngs, she seems to have more compassion for Bertha than for many of her women characters” (Tea Reads). It’s because she had a lot in common with Bertha and Bertha is a reflection of the author herself.

Like Bertha, the main character in “Bliss,” Katherine had a rocky love life. Katherine “met, married and left her first husband, George Bowden, all within just three weeks” (The British Empire). Like Bertha, she felt neglected by her second husband John Middleton Murray and she had an unfaithful husband. “When Murray had an affair with the Princess Bibesco (née Asquith), Mansfield objected not to the affair but to her letters to Murray: ‘I am afraid you must stop writing these love letters to my husband while he and I live together. It is one of the things which are not done in our world’" (Books and Writers).

“Katherine Mansfield was bisexual” (The British Empire) and there is some hints in “Bliss,” that Bertha Young might be as well. “Bertha touches Miss Fulton's arm and feels a ‘fire of bliss’; a look passes between them. Through the inane dinner conversation, Bertha blissfully wonders at her experience and waits for ‘a sign’ from Miss Fulton with little idea of what such a sign would mean. It becomes clearer to Bertha in a moment. Miss Fulton seems to give a sign, and they go to the garden and gaze at the pear tree, that had seemed to Bertha to be a symbol of her openness and vulnerability. What exactly does it suggest now? No matter what, to Bertha, the women achieve a perfect, wordless understanding. But Mansfield is ambiguous. What have they understood? Something feminine? Something about desire? Has Miss Fulton really participated in this experience, or is Bertha imagining their epiphany? Mansfield has more surprises. As the guests prepare to leave, Bertha takes a new course: ‘For the first time in her life Bertha Young desired her husband!’ Not many writers could suggest how a young woman's homoerotic feelings could so quickly shift to heterosexual ones,” (Seoule).

“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, whether she is referring to Harry and the affair she had with him, or Bertha and flirtation between them, or perhaps Mansfield herself is bisexual and referring to them both,” (“Bliss”). In conclusion, Mansfield wrote some aspects of her own life in her fictional characters and has many similarities to Bertha, the woman in “Bliss,” including her love life, marriage, sexuality, personality, and her love for nature.