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

The mention of bliss leads us back to the housewife's state of euphoria-a reckless gaiety similar to Laura's joy at the beauty, excitement, and promise of the grand day in "The Garden Party" (2198). As mentioned before, Bertha's elation filled her with a vigor and emotion that somehow needed to be exteriorized.

It is interesting to note to what extent Bertha's rhapsodic outbursts of the first scenes conform to the clinical picture described by Freud in "A Case of Hysteria" (87-88): ". . an impulsion towards the discharge of an unconscious excitation will so far as possible make use of any channel for discharge which may already be in existence." Having found no release in the zeal and enthusiasm with which she arranged and decorated the fruit on the dining table, the heroine has rushed up to the nursery in search of another outlet for her emotions. However, the fact that Bertha turns up precisely at the wrong moment (the nurse is giving Little B her supper) tacitly underlines how much of a stranger she is in her daughter's world. Not daring to question the nurse's authority, the mother is converted into a mere observer. She therefore feels excluded or alienated: "Why have a baby if it has to be kept-not in a case like a rare, rare fiddle-but in another woman's arms?" (201 ) . The way form and content converge here is most significant. On the one hand, Bertha's feeling of absurdity with the nurse is like an incremental repetition of her initial blame on "idiotic civilisation."On the other hand, as Daly remarks, this repetition also anticipates the question implicit at the end of the story, this time beginning "Why have a husband if . . ." (7475). Anyway, this momentary perception of society's control over her life does not lead to any kind of "awakening" on Bertha's part. Nor does it diminish her rapture, especially as she manages to "snatch" a few moments of happiness alone with Little B. However, the contrast between Bertha's feelings and her verbalized attitude is, to say the least, striking. The mother is incapable of transmitting warmth and love to her baby: "You're nice-you're very nice!" said she, kissing her warm baby. "I'm fond of you. I like you" (202) . Nor will she be able, moments later, to speak emotionally to her husband over the phone, despite her craving "to get in touch with him for a moment" (202). Hence, although the story is mediated through Bertha's consciousness-a consciousness that dismisses any encumbrance unto "idiotic civilisation"-it nevertheless becomes evident that her discourse is tempered by social conditioning. In other words, behind her discourse lies the dominant ideology of a "civilization" that suppresses such embarrassingly feminine notions as bliss to the sphere of the unrepresentable. Accordingly, Bertha's high excitement, which she interpreted at first as "bliss" but soon calls "hysteria," must be seen as the reactive symptom of a woman trapped within middle-class, phallocentric notions of femininity. Indeed, by taking up Mansfield's invitation to readers to "fill in her ellipses" (Kaplan 151), Bertha's inarticulateness, her "breathless speech studded with gaps, hesitations, cut off clauses, etc." (Gregor 75), can all be read as attempts on her part to compensate, to keep from acknowledging consciously, how absurdly "civilized" she herself is. Thus, although the heroine's self-deception was not immediately obvious, at this point of the story, her uncritical view of herself as a supposedly happy, middle-class housewife now shows her up as a pathetically fallible or unreliable narrator. For this reason, Mansfield's insistence on the neurotic, childlike, or simply innocent nature of her heroine should not be overlooked. Superficially, such a characterization could be viewed as simply reminiscent of romantic heroines like Dickens's Dora in David Copperfield or Little Dorrit. However, the author's "modernist" preoccupation with the workings of the human mind logically prompted her to look beyond the idealized (and developmentally static) child-women so dear to Victorian novelists. In "Bliss," the heroine's patent naivete is not an individual or straightforward character trait, to be rendered in a transparent story form, but rather a focus of confusion and conflict. The tantalizing aspect of the story is, therefore, Mansfield's ability to divert the readers' attention away from the (almost non-existent) plot and invite them instead to forage into the irrationality of the human mind. From this vantage point, Bertha's apparent candidness leads to a rather more incisive revelation, especially if her bliss is seen to be based on a deliberate evasion of knowledge into what Freud identified as denial and repression (89) . In "A Case of Hysteria," Freud explains that a normal train of thought, however intense it may be, can usually be disposed of. It becomes pathological only if the individual cannot voluntarily control or dissipate it. If, as with his patient Dora, or in this case Bertha, no amount of conscious or voluntary effort can remove "this excessively intense train of thought," it is, Freud's observations suggest, because the root cause for the manifest excitation reaches far down into unconscious, repressed material. The value of this insight into the workings of the mind is that it problematizes the stability of the character's personality.8 As the reader oscillates between identification with and alienation from this immature woman's neurotic impulses, a kind of mystery is engendered, ". . . not the puzzle kind," Eudora Welty would add, "but the mystery of allurement" which, she believes, is fundamental in any good story (qtd. in Head 23).