Significance of Bliss in The Story Bliss

Significance of Bliss in the story Bliss
Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ is one of her first great short stories – the
genre she excelled at. ‘Bliss’ was first published in 1918, and is shot through with
homoerotic longing and the animalistic nature of sexual desire. However, because Mansfield
was writing in 1918, these things can only be hinted at through symbolism and suggestion.
‘Bliss’ calls to mind the phrase ‘ignorance is bliss’, and this is the question which lurks
behind Mansfield’s story.
The story focuses on Bertha Young, a 30 year-old wife and mother who
enjoys a comfortable middle-class life with her husband Harry and their baby. However, as
the story goes on, we wonder whether she does ‘enjoy’ her life. ‘Bliss’ begins by telling us
that Bertha passes her days in an almost delirious state of happiness and contentment, but we
begin to wonder how a person can possibly sustain this level of unbridled joy. Is it hiding an
inner turmoil or nagging doubt that everything is not all right? Since this is a modernist short
story, we get to know the characters through moments in their lives rather than through a
coherent and action-driven plot. We see Bertha with her baby and the nanny, and the
protective way the nanny takes possession of the baby, as if shutting out the mother from
the picture. We learn that Bertha has recently made the acquaintance of a young, beautiful,
and exciting woman, Pearl Fulton, and there is a suggestion that Bertha idolises Pearl, and
perhaps even harbours sexual desire for her. Pearl is invited to the dinner party which Bertha
and Harry are hosting, and the remainder of the story focuses on this single evening.
The dinner party provides us with an opportunity to observe the characters

as their true feelings are suppressed by the social constraints of the event. Decorum has to be
observed; Bertha can hint at a deep affinity between her and Pearl, but can only do so
through alluding in her conversation to the pear tree (oddly enough, spelling out the first four
letters of Pearl’s name) in the garden, which Bertha interprets as a symbol for herself and
Pearl. At the end of the evening, Bertha’s world seems to come crashing down as she
observes her husband putting Pearl’s coat on her shoulders and arranging to meet up for a
secret tryst with her. Bertha’s husband and Pearl are having a secret affair. Once they have
left, Bertha collapses in a chair and asks what is going to happen now. But at this point the
story ends: as with many modernist narratives, we are left with a question at the end, the
implication being that life more often presents us with unanswered questions than it does
easy solutions or neatly tied-up loose ends.
Food and fruit play an important symbolic role in ‘Bliss’, so it’s worth
analysing how Katherine Mansfield uses them. Bertha’s husband, Harry, at dinner,
demonstrates a ‘shameless passion for the white flesh of the lobster’, the implication being
that Harry devours the ‘white flesh’ of beautiful women as rapaciously as he does the food
on his dinner-plate. The pear tree, similarly, is loaded with symbolism, although – as is so
often the case with modernism – its symbolism does not rely on some shared ‘code’ which
we as readers simply come along and decode, as would be the case if Mansfield had made it
an apple tree instead (with all of its connotations of temptation, sin, and the forbidden which
the apple tree from the Garden of Eden summons). The pear tree suggests these connotations
but clouds them, making it difficult for us to know for certain how we should interpret or
analyse its significance in the story. The apple tree and the Genesis story of Eve and the Fall
of Man brings us back to knowledge, and that takes us back to the story’s title, ‘Bliss’, with
its invitation to recall the proverb ‘ignorance is bliss’. But pears are altogether more
succulent, luscious, and voluptuous than apples, so Mansfield combines sexual temptation
with more general ideas of sin and forbidden knowledge.
‘Bliss’ is one of Katherine Mansfield’s greatest short stories, and its

greatness partly resides in its ambiguities. Even Bertha’s final exclamation, ‘Oh, what is
going to happen now?’, can be read less as a declaration of despair than an embracing of the
wild and unpredictable vagaries of life.

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Significance of Bliss in the story Bliss

The dinner party provides us with an opportunity to observe the characters

‘Bliss’ is one of Katherine Mansfield’s greatest short stories, and its

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