Bliss and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

by Katherine Mansfield, Carol DellAmico (Introduction)

Overview

Bliss and Other Stories represents the range of themes and concerns for which Katherine Mansfield is known. Besides the great number of marriage and couples narratives, this collection also includes "woman alone" stories about unmarried women exploring hopes, dreams, trials, and fears. Mansfield’s greatest skill is her ability to capture accurately the tender life of the human psyche and soul.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781411431201
Publisher:	Barnes & Noble
Publication date:	09/01/2009
Series:	Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	603 KB
Age Range:	3 Months to 18 Years

About the Author

Mansfield described herself as “a writer first and a woman after.” One of the first to benefit when British institutions of higher education opened to women, she attended Queen’s College in London. The Wellington of her childhood appears as a setting in many of her stories although she returned to her colonial homeland for only two years after leaving Queen’s. Born in Wellington, New Zealand, Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp (1888–1923) adopted the name of Katherine Mansfield when she began to publish her fiction in 1907.

Introduction

Katherine Mansfield died in her early thirties leaving behind a body of short stories so masterful that the great Virginia Woolf considered Mansfield her most serious literary rival. Foregoing the overarching narrative architecture of plot, in favor of the nuance of the telling episode, Mansfield's stories are admired for their peerless technique. Most critics agree that Manfield's art marks a watershed in the English-language short story, opening up stylistic possibilities for those writers who came after her. As one of her biographers, Antony Alpers, so aptly says, Mansfield's stories often turn on a moment of "private crisis" experienced by the main character. In these moments of revelation, panic, or insight, readers see themselves, as Mansfield's skill above all is her ability to capture thrillingly accurately the tender life of the human psyche and soul.

Mansfield was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in the coastal town of Wellington, New Zealand, on October 14, 1888. In 1903, she was sent to a progressive London girls' school, Queen's College. Mansfield was a precocious young woman, interested in music and writing, and her head was turned by her time in London. She took on the view so common of youthful colonials of the time, namely that real life was taking place not in her homeland but elsewhere-in the great cities of the mother country. Upon her return to New Zealand in 1906, she asked to be allowed to return to London. Her parents eventually conceded, and Mansfield found herself the master of a small allowance and her own life in London just before her twentieth birthday.

Considering Mansfield's headlong encounter with all that life had to offer, it is terribly ironic that she would be overcome by a debilitating illness so early in life. Yet, in 1912, Mansfield showed the first serious signs of the full-blown tuberculosis she would eventually contract and then die of in 1923. Needless to say, before the disease killed her, it profoundly affected her life and happiness. In attempts to cure herself, for example, she was forced to spend protracted periods in better climates away from England and apart from her husband. Mansfield never asked Murry to live with her abroad, however. She was convinced that this would significantly harm, if not ruin, his career, not to mention their marriage. The story "The Man Without a Temperament" imagines what their life would have been like, together, in a foreign pension. The picture is not pretty. The Murry figure's life is so severely curtailed, amounting to little more than nursing duties and kind attentions to his delicate wife, that he has become the titular "man without a temperament." The male character is, in short, a man so frustrated and repressed he is hardly a personality at all. The rather listless invalid of the story, however, does not particularly resemble Mansfield. Far from languishing away her days when she was ill, Mansfield never lost her creative drive. The sense that her days were limited seems to have spurred her on as an artist, and she wrote steadily until her death. Mansfield published three volumes of short stories in her lifetime. These volumes are collections of the stories that she had consistently been submitting to major literary journals. In a German Pension was published in 1911, Bliss and Other Stories in 1920, and The Garden Party and Other Stories in 1922. The present volume is a reissuing of this second book of short stories.

In Bliss and Other Stories Mansfield is at the height of her powers as a writer. As a collection, further, these stories represent the range of themes and concerns for which Mansfield is known. For example, as numerous critics do, it is possible to group together a number of Mansfield's stories as marriage or couples narratives-stories depicting relations between married partners or lovers-or even ex-lovers as we see in "A Dill Pickle." "Bliss," the title story of this collection, falls into this category, and it is also a story whose climax involves a moment of "private crisis" for its protagonist. This moment is, essentially, Bertha Young's discovery that her husband is having an affair with the woman with whom she believed she had had a moment of deep spiritual connection earlier in the evening. Bertha's sense that she had somehow connected with this woman, Pearl Fulton, and her discovery of her husband's affair with Pearl, occur at the dinner party to which Bertha has been looking forward to with nervous excitement and happy anticipation all day, emotions which she believes amount to a state of "bliss." Worth noting about "Bliss," in addition, is that another momentous event occurs for Bertha on the day of her dinner party, before her discovery of the affair. For the first time in her life she finds herself genuinely sexually attracted to her husband.

"Bliss" suggests more than one reading. One wonders if it is possible that Bertha feels attracted to her husband only because on some level she knows he is having an affair, so that it has taken jealously to bring her to life as a sexual being. Or, considering her ecstatic sense of connection to Pearl, it is also possible that these erotic stirrings are occasioned by her attraction to Pearl, so that feelings for Pearl and not her husband are the true root of her first real sexual longings. The reader must also question, of course, whether there was indeed a moment of communion between the two women, or whether this was only something Bertha imagined. Either way, "Bliss" ends with the young wife overtaken by intense emotion quite other than bliss; indeed, perhaps her nervous excitement all day hasn't been bliss at all, only that which she has decided is bliss owing to how little she knows herself, her husband, and her friends. At the story's conclusion the reader is left wondering, in a state of suspense akin to Bertha's: What she will do about her husband's affair and who is she, really?

In "Prelude," the longest story of Mansfield's career, readers find a somewhat different treatment of a marriage. In this story, Mansfield's main drive is to capture the world of her childhood in New Zealand, which she does with surpassing artistry, as critics without exception agree. "Prelude" does not so much tell a story as, in more typical Mansfield fashion, present the reader with a series of episodes. These episodes from the life of a family reveal the personalities and dreams of the family's various members, two of which are a husband and wife, Linda and Stanley Burnell. Stanley is very much in love with his delicate wife, as she is with him; yet, as the scenes and episodes that revolve around Linda demonstrate, she is also very nearly overwhelmed by her husband's vigor. Like so many more sensitive and physically fragile women of her time, the Victorian onus to produce numerous offspring and to serve as a maternal paragon at the head of a large brood oppresses Linda Burnell. Linda 's bittersweet experience of marriage, then, is the treatment of marriage purveyed by "Prelude."

Another category of story many critics recognize in Mansfield's work is that of "woman alone" stories. These stories about unmarried women explore these women's hopes, dreams, trials, and fears. The most somber of the stories depict older women of slender means who are either at the end of their financial tether or else keenly suffering derision for their unmarried state. In "Pictures," for example, Mansfield depicts a middle-aged woman whose days on the stage seem to be ending, with prostitution as a probable next step. This is an era in which few women were educated or possessed of marketable skills, when gainful employment was not simply scarce, but reserved primarily for men. Ada Moss of "Pictures" makes her morning rounds to theatrical agents cheerfully, yet this cheerfulness is quite possibly incipient madness, as Ada appears to be escaping into fantasy as a means of avoiding having to face the seriousness of her plight. Also falling into the category of the "woman alone" story is "The Little Governess." Here, the difficulties single women experience as they strive to maintain a scrupulously "respectable" reputation-something indispensable for the governess of this story whose job brings her into contact with children-is explored.

"Sun and Moon" and "The Wind Blows" represent another type of story at which Mansfield excelled, the story of small children. "Sun and Moon" particularly attests to Mansfield's preternatural ability to recall, exactly, what it was like to be a child. This story is much like "Prelude" in this regard, for "Prelude" is as much about the Burnell couple's children as it is about the couple's marriage. Indeed, as numerous scholars have pointed out, the girl Kezia at "Prelude"'s center is a double for the young Mansfield herself.

In one of her letters to Murry, Mansfield describes two key inspirations for her writing. One, she says, is a sense of intense joy. This, undoubtedly, inspired works such as her masterpiece "Prelude." The other, she says, is a sense of doom and hopelessness that is also a protest against corruption in all of its spiritual forms. This hatred of the tawdry, cruel, and corrupt underlies, without a doubt, stories such as "Je ne parle pas français," "A Dill Pickle," and "Mr. Reginald Peacock's Day." In these stories, we find repellently selfish and narcissistic characters whose self-involvement, not coincidentally, adversely affects those with whom they live or come into contact. Of course, these same three stories can be categorized as couples narratives, demonstrating the way in which categorizing Manfield's stories is a mere convenience. Furthermore, that they are couples narratives whose protagonists are unsavory points to the range of the couples stories' explorations of male-female relations. This group of stories with narcissistic main characters represents one extreme, in which these relations are so often ugly or else unsatisfactory and hurtful to one of the parties involved. At the other extreme are stories such as "Prelude," where a good relationship founded on genuine love is nevertheless realistically presented as not without its weaknesses.

But of course not all of Mansfield's stories-couples' narratives or otherwise-can be neatly categorized. Some are wholly individual, such as the complexly surprising "Revelations" and "The Escape," the original "Psychology," and the playful "Feuille d'Album." In "Feuille d'Album, a young artist new to the bohemian scene of early twentieth-century Paris becomes the focus of interest of other expatriates. He is of particular interest to young lady expatriates who believe that he must be helped, brought out of his shell, as it were, and initiated into the delights of grown-up love. More than one of these enterprising young women attempts to lure him into an affair, but to no avail. He is incurably shy, they decide. However, once the story shifts from the concerns of these young women to the young man himself, a somewhat different picture emerges. In fact, the youthful artist has a flourishing romantic life, as naive as it may be. He is in love with a young Parisian woman who lives across from him, who he has yet to meet. The story ends with the young man finally engineering a meeting with his love, a meeting that reveals a heretofore unsuspected complexity in the character of the young artist. Far from being a dull young man, or an overly romantic young man, the reader learns that he possesses, in fact, great humor and intelligence.

Mansfield was solidly connected to the literary circles of her time. The acceptance of her story submissions by well-respected literary journals cemented relationships between her and the journals' editors and other contributors. Moreover, she was brought to the attention of those most important in literary London, Virginia Woolf, for example, who admired her work. Indeed, in a moment of chilling honesty, Woolf admits in her diary that she felt a fleeting moment of relief upon hearing of Mansfield's death. Of course, Woolf felt other emotions on hearing of her colleague's death, regret and sadness among them. She had, indeed, accepted "Prelude" for printing at the press she and her husband owned and ran, the Hogarth Press.

While Woolf and Mansfield were acquainted and mutually respectful of each other as artists, they were close friends. Among Mansfield and Murry's close friends, nonetheless, were other major literary talents of the time, D. H. Lawrence, for example. The bond between Lawrence and Mansfield rested, among other things, on mutual respect, if not on any particular deep liking for the other's prose style, and on their shared experience as tuberculosis sufferers.

Critics often wonder whether Mansfield would have eventually written novels, or if she would have remained a writer of short stories exclusively. While there exists some evidence of plans for a novel or two, there is nothing so developed that this question can be answered definitively in the affirmative. All that can be said, finally, is that the life of a major literary talent was cut terribly short.