Apperance Vs Reality

In " A married man's story" and " Bliss" Katherine Mansfield is able to portray how appearance might be totally different from reality. " A married man's story" shows us inside the husbands thoughts and memories and how in reality he is dispassionate about everything around him . While , in "Bliss" we get a glimpse of how Bertha believes her life is "Bliss" instead of facing reality.

We enter the mind of the husband in " a married man's story" and we reveal that even though from the outside his family seems happy and well suited . In reality however,he is detached from his wife and child and how he "never accepted " his child as his own. He does not love his wife and feels that she has no "strong maternal feelings" . He has no reason of being with her yet he can not leave her out of fear of change . One might explain his detachment from his family due to his past and how his father was also detached and might have been having an affair . Another memory that might have influenced his character was that he suspects that one night his mother came to him before she died and told him that his father had poisoned her. These childhood incidents might be the reason why he can not be passionate about his family and why he always feels that he is not connected to them.

Bertha's character in " Bliss" believes that her life is perfect and that she has a loving husband and a beautiful baby . She imagines her life as the perfect , beautiful pear tree. She does not notice the reality of her life and that she is unable to control it, we see how she begs the nanny to finish feeding her baby,and until the end of the story she does not realize that her husband is having an affair with one of her close friends. In the end she goes back to the pear tree to make sure it is still "beautiful as ever" , choosing to live a life that appears