Katherine Mansfield's "Bliss": "The Rare Fiddle" as emblem of the political and sexual alienation of woman

Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 1999 by D'Arcy, Chantal Cornut-Gentille

Whereas, as I shall argue, unequivocal Freudian shades may be traced in the gaps, silences, and ambiguities of "Bliss," there is another subversive aspect of the story which has not been fully recognized. It seems that Mansfield's reputation as a "delicate female stylist," engendered by her homely and domestic choice of subject-matter, has tended to obscure the radical nature of her political commentary (Gregor 65-67; Head 128). A broad overview of social and political happenings at the turn of the century will help underline the seriousness of the sexual politics that lie "beneath the fabric" of this particular tale.

The period after the Boer War (1899-1902) was a time of colonial outback, when attention was diverted from overseas possessions to very immediate social problems at home. The reawakening of social conscience was made patent in the atmosphere of political passion and activism that marked the emergence and rapid growth of the Labour Party during the last decade of the nineteenth century. These years of political effervescence were also characterized by serious social instability, mainly connected with the growth of trade unionism and the question of the vote for women. What distinguished the newly arising British Left from radical parties in other European countries was that it emanated more from humanitarian ideals or a pragmatic response to poverty and the conditions of working-class life than from Marxist ideology. British socialism therefore favored gradual and piecemeal reform rather than revolution, and, as such, it could have seemed readily compatible or even complementary with the emerging feminism of the time that likewise preferred reformism to either sex or class warfare.

However, although many left-wingers may have shared this perspective in theory, in practice, socialist organizations tended to combine formal commitments to equality with outright marginalization of "women issues." This type of unthinking sexism, a suffrage campaigner noted, permeated all levels of political and personal life: "Most of us who were married," she stated, "found that `Votes for Women' were of less interest to our husbands than their own dinners" (Bryson 111 ) . At times, these different priorities resulted in an open clash between the methods and aspirations of socialists and feminists. Most famously, the British Labour Party refused to support the suffrage campaign for women's enfranchisement on the grounds that this would only strengthen the (conservative) voting power of the middle class; the response of some women to this "betrayal" was to follow Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst out of the party and to form their own militant and independent organization (Bryson 89-106). However, as Diane Atkinson has shown (9),5 such polarization at the level of national organization concealed a widespread continuity at the grass roots, as women continued to campaign both in the mainstream of politics and in individual ventures invariably directed at exposing the misogyny of society. Given that Mansfield was undoubtedly aware of the sex-specific problems faced by women at the time, her work "Bliss" can be viewed as a literary response which delicately attempted to present women's oppression in a different light from both the official Labor position of "no policy" on women's issues and from the conventional view of the suffrage campaign that saw women's subordination as beginning and ending with their lack of political rights.