Katherine

Imagery in Katherine Mansfield's Short Story "Bliss"

Since the death of Katherine Mansfield, the kind of attention her short stories have received has followed an understandably meandering path. There is no doubt that she joins D.H.Lawrence and Aldous Huxly among others in parading those she knew in real life through the pages of her fiction-and no one more consistently than herself.(Magalaner,p.413).

The vision of the human condition which emerges from Katherine Mansfield's stories is a painful one. It is predicated upon the notion that to be human is to be a victim and that life preys upon those least capable of defending themselves against the impossible and intolerable situations it presents. Each stage and condition of life has inescapable situations peculiar to it. Women are victimized by the basic fact of their sex: demanding and insensitive men brutalize them, child birth exploits them, and female self-sacrifice is regarded by the male world as routine and expectable. The young and naïve are victimized by the process of learning the lessons life waits to teach: the fact of death, the relentless passage of beauty and vigor, the disappointment of idealism. The old are victimized by loneliness and sickness,by fear of death,by the thoughtless energy of the younger world around them.Mansfield's sympathies are torn between her commitment to life itself, the potential beauty of experience,and the apparent denial of that potential beauty when the chips are down.

To enter into a relationship with another person is,according to Mansfield,to be victimized by the one most loved,most trusted .The only option is to become a victimizer,to inflict the pain,betray the trust.

To see life in such terms is clearly to preclude the grandeur and the sense of positive potential necessary for tragedy, even if one were serious to entertain the possibility of tragedy in the twentieth century .Irony is the perfect mode of expression for such a vision,since irony always...