Monkey business: Darwin, displacement, and literary form in Katherine Mansfield's "Bliss" - Critical Essay

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1998 by Thomas Dilworth

Her husband's selection of another woman has evolutionary resonance. Bertha is passed over by natural selection. She has lost the human race, which is really only an animal race. She loses Harry as her mate because her rival, not she, is the fittest.

Poor Bertha is not aggressive enough to survive as exclusive or primary mate even in the civilized jungle of upper-class London. She is ineffectual, having forgotten the house-key "as usual" (95). She finds it difficult to assert motherly claims over her own baby. She is sensitive to the nurse's signal "that meant she had come into the nursery at another wrong moment" (97). When the nurse tells her that the baby had clutched and tugged a dog's ear in the park that afternoon, "Bertha wanted to ask if it wasn't rather dangerous to let her clutch at a strange dog's ear. But she did not dare to. She stood watching them, her hands by her side, like the poor little girl in front of the rich little girl with the doll" (97). She manages to take over the feeding of her baby but, like a child herself, passively suffers the nanny's chiding, "Now, don't excite her after her supper. You know you do" (97). Bertha "loved" her baby but is unable to quite say so, saying instead, "You're nice--you're very nice! ... I'm fond of you. I like you" (98). She is called away to the telephone by the nanny "coming back in triumph and seizing" the baby (98). On the phone, she is unable to break through inhibiting upper-class British mores or whatever it is that precludes her telling her husband how happy she is:

   She couldn't absurdly cry: `Hasn't it been a divine day!' `What is it?'
   rapped out the little voice. `Nothing. Entendu, said Bertha, and hung up
   the receiver, thinking how more than idiotic civilization was. (98).

"Entendu" is an example of her speaking in language not authentically hers, which is another measure of weakness. Mansfield writes about Bertha to John Middleton Murry, "these words and expressions were not & couldn't be hers (Letters 2: 121).

Another aspect of ineffectuality and inauthenticity is what amounts to a motif of her deliberately not seeing or only minimally seeing, a motif suggesting that she prefers happiness to truth. "She hardly dared to look: into the mirror" (96); she tells the maid not to turn on the light (96); "she pressed her hands to her eyes" (100); as they all go into the drawing-room after supper, she says "don't turn up the light for a moment. It is so lovely" (105). This motif implies more than the ordinary limits of point of view. When she draws the parallel between her ardor for Harry and Pearl Fulton's feelings, she approaches the dangerous question of the object of Fulton's longing: "But then--" and breaks off (103), unwilling to risk an unhappy intuitive conclusion. Semi-consciously, at least, she epitomizes the cliche that Mansfield must have had in mind when giving her story its rifle, "Ignorance is bliss." The cliche is false in a world of Darwinian struggle, where the more you know and the more you notice the better able you are to survive.