Bliss

The story’s limited third person omniscient narrative voice forces the reader to be guided only by Bertha’s perceptions and misinterpretations of the people and events around her. The reader knows all there is to know about Bertha’s thoughts and feelings, and events are filtered through her exuberant lens. This narrative voice enables a deep understanding of the protagonist. The evening unfolds for the reader just as it unfolds for Bertha—including the jolt of the epiphany that ends the story. Interestingly, Bertha is aware of Harry’s ability to surprise her. In fact, “he made a point of catching Bertha’s heels with” unexpected responses in their conversations. She may make an idealistic comment about a person, and Harry counters with a childish comment such as “pure flatulence.” She admits that “for some strange reason Bertha liked this and almost admired it in him very much” (Paragraph 47).

Ironically, Harry’s infidelity also trips her up—to a heightened degree—a feeling that the reader experiences in tandem with Bertha. Just like Bertha, the reader has a eureka experience which is possible because of the narrative voice. Once the ending is revealed, there is a strong urge to reread the story to find the missing clues. The second reading allows the audience—now armed with full narrative omniscience—to appreciate the skillful foreshadowing and characterization.

As a literary device, dialogue is a powerful tool that serves multiple purposes, such as providing exposition and developing characters, as well as simply enabling plot twists and turns. Traditionally, dialogue follows a recognizable pattern. The speaker is identified, a dialogue tag is given, and then the words are encased in quotation marks. One quality of modernist literature is a shift from the traditional to a more free and indirect discourse between characters. Although in Mansfield’s work she generally maintains the quotation marks, she frequently omits dialogue tags and even speaker identification. Although this style of dialogue is very common in contemporary literature, it was an innovative product of Mansfield’s time. The Modernists eschewed the traditional way of writing.

This dialogue style is established immediately in the story. Bertha arrives home and greets the housemaid, Mary, with a question.

‘Is nurse back?’

‘Yes, M’m.’

‘And has the fruit come?’

‘Yes, M’m. Everything’s come.’

‘Bring the fruit up to the dining-room, will you? I’ll arrange it before I go upstairs.’ (Paragraphs 4-8)

This dialogue provides much insight. For example, Bertha’s personality can be read in two ways. In a flattering interpretation, she is energetic, used to running a household, and easily able to pivot from introspection to the task at hand. A more critical view is that she is rude, bossy, and only worried about trivial matters as she chooses to arrange fruit before seeing her baby. The sketchiness of the dialogue allows a reader to interact with the story on a more personal level. The reader decides—to a degree—what kind of person Bertha is. This simple dialogue passage also provides information typical to a story’s exposition: the Youngs are well-to-do. This is inferred from the fact that they have at least two servants, and they are used to having a grocer deliver their produce to their house. Choosing inference over blatant expository detail through simplified dialogue is a quality of modernist storytelling.

The superficiality of the dialogue frequently mirrors the shallowness of the characters. When Eddie Warren joins the party, this symbolic aspect of the dialogue is evident. Mrs. Norman Knight, noticing Eddie’s clothing, bursts out with “Oh, Mr. Warren, what happy socks!” to which he replies, “I am so glad you like them…They seem to have got so much whiter since the moon rose” (Paragraphs 72-73).

“Bliss” is unique in the frequent interruptions, related to both plot and syntax, that are present throughout the story. The storyline takes place during a few hours of one day in Bertha’s life, and as such, the plot is essentially the moments that make up those hours. The plot interruptions occur consistently, and often when Bertha is about to gain insight into either herself or the other characters. For example, Bertha has scored a win against Nanny, and she is alone with her baby thinking, “And indeed, she loved Little B so much—her neck as she bent forward, her exquisite toes as they shone transparent in the firelight” (Paragraph 33). Before she can fully connect her general happiness to this specific joy, the phone rings. She is called away to speak to Harry.

The characters’ entrances to the dinner party are also interruptive. Bertha is conversing in the foyer with the Knights when the doorbell rings, and Eddie Warren enters, “(as usual) in a state of acute distress” (Paragraph 62). Bertha is reflecting on her guests when Harry bangs through the front door and swarms up the stairs to change. Pearl Fulton’s entrance, the most artistic of all, interrupts the silly dialogue typical of the Youngs. The guests all are waiting. Then “came another tiny moment, while they waited, laughing and talking, just a trifle too much at their ease, a trifle too unaware. And then Miss Fulton, all in silver, with a silver fillet binding her pale blonde hair, came in smiling, her head a little on one side” (Paragraph 84). A physical interruption occurs in the story at that point. Miss Fulton’s comment as she enters the scene—all silver and glamor—is its own three-word paragraph: “Am I late?”

The syntactic interruptions are a signature of Mansfield’s writing style. One of the most evident examples is the actual layout of this story. The paragraphs are brief. The lines of dialogue are short, and each miniscule speech is an individual paragraph. In fact, there are 160 paragraphs in this short, 4800-word story. The brevity could be symbolic of the shallowness of the characters. Perhaps it is metaphoric of the speed in which they live their lives or by which Bertha’s life is transformed at the end.

Another type of syntactic interruption is on a more granular level, particularly during stream-of-conscious moments. For example, this passage which is laden with motifs (coldness, darkness, waiting) and ties to the theme of Bertha’s growing self-awareness:

It was almost unbearable. She hardly dared to breathe for fear of fanning it higher, and yet she breathed deeply, deeply. She hardly dared to look into the cold mirror–but she did look, and it gave her back a woman, radiant, with smiling, trembling lips, with big, dark eyes and an air of listening, waiting for something…divine to happen…that she knew must happen…infallibly (Paragraph 10).