“She was thirty
She still had moments
To run instead of walk
To laugh instead of smile
To cry heavily instead of sob”
Coming from a well-respected family in Wellington, New Zealand, Mansfield started wearing a fictional tone in her writing from a very young age. Back in the very high school, her short stories found their way in the school newspaper and later in a New Zealand literary journal. It was in her college days when she resumed working on short stories in particular. Her writings had the impression of her being and the lifestyle she adopted to sustain. She had relationships with both men and women throughout her life and did marry twice in her lifetime.
‘Bliss’ is apprehended till this century as one of the most vibrant and revolutionizing works of Mansfield. When this work was created by Mansfield in 1918, most of the women in Britain couldn’t vote, despite the legislation already being passed in the state that wealthy women above the age of thirty have the right to do so. British society during those days was of the kind which was governed by the rules of dominance in entirety and there was no space for anyone to even sneak for discussions on sex or anything to do with the body. An open discussion was a far-sighted thing in those times. As a result, women were expected to live in a certain manner to uphold the position granted to their gender. They were slaves to the need of being free to work, openly voice out their feelings and expressions, and have relationships beyond marriage.
‘Bliss’ came up as a daring work in these times where actualities like homosexuality were brutally repressed in Britain. It was until 1967, that Homosexuality was illegal in England, and the community faced discrimination throughout the twentieth century. This period also clashed with the end of World War 1 which had a traumatic effect on Europe, and paved the way for Modernistic literary and artistic movements. For all our avid readers who are also literary fiction enthusiast, this work is strongly recommended.
● Full Title: Bliss
● Written in: 1918 in France
● Literary Period: Modernist
The work conceives the plight of women, where Mansfield beautifully pens down how there are times after the revolting oppression suffered by women, and the urge is born to just “standstill” and ‘laugh for no reason at all’, and how there is a colossal desire within oneself to express one’s internal state and run away from a society that is defined by the rules of propriety. Three of the thought giving themes around which ‘Bliss’ revolves, is the Women’s Role and Social Constraint, Aesthetics- Appearance and Performance, Sexuality and Desire are the themes that walk-in row.
A careful picture has been penned through the protagonist of the short story Bertha, of the time when due to the then existing conventions, homosexuality was neither legal nor acceptable; which forced people to conceal feelings of love and desire. There have been claims of the civilization to be idiotic since it did not even grant emotional freedom with devastating disgust witnessed in people for the women from different classes of the society. Excellent aesthetic figures of the peach tree, silver color, the ambiance of the scene has been used to portray how difficult it is to be happy for a woman with hidden desires.
Mansfield, in her lifetime, wrote several other short stories and published a dozen articles. Her plentiful experiences formed the foundation of her first published collection, In a German Pension(1911), which she later described as “immature” Trajectories kept revolting even in Mansfield’s life, sometimes with her divorces and homo-sexual affairs and other time being the death of her brother and December 1917 was a final nail to the coffin when she was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis. After 9th January 1923, the modernist literary world received no more writing from her but she still lives in all her creations that were out of the league and brought a revolution in the thought-process of the readers.
Film and television about Mansfield-
● A Picture of Katherine Mansfield, a 1973 BBC television drama series
● Leave All Fair (1985), directed by John Reid
● A Portrait of Katherine Mansfield: The Woman and the Writer (1987)
● The Life and Writings of Katherine Mansfield (2006), directed by Stacy Waymack Thornton
● Bliss (2011), produced by Michele Fantl, directed by Fiona Samuel
Piece By:
Antisha Nigam
On paper, a college student majoring in Commerce and minoring in Economics. In-person, a wild species who is passionately struggling for the answers to “Why” rather than settling like the earlier times with “what” and “how”. One can always reach out to me for a ceaseless conversation over the platter of food, finance, and literature coupled with a cup of hot poetry.
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