Katherine Mansfield And Sexuality

One of the themes that can be found in the stories of Katherine Mansfield centres upon the role, status, sexuality, and "place" of women in society. According to Chantal Cornut-Gentille d'Arcy, "Mansfield's succinct narratives ... are triumphs of style, a style which challenged the conventional parameters of nineteenth-century realism, constrained to plot, sequential development, climax, and conclusion" (244). More specifically, maintains that "even though Mansfield never acknowledged any profound engagement with Freudian approaches to sexuality or psychic disorder ... Mansfield moved in a context which undoubtedly indicates she was aware of Freud's ideas and discoveries" (245).

This is evident in 'Life of Ma Parker', which describes the life of a widowed charwoman who has experienced nothing more than tragedy throughout her life and who most recently has had the horrible task of burying her loving little grandson (Lohafer 475). Ma Parker is written by Mansfield from both a Freudian psychological and a sociological perspective. Susan Lohafer characterises the story as "a spare iconography of working-class life that makes the story a perfect set-piece for cultural studies" (475). In the story, an aging charwoman must not only cope with the death of her grandson, she must also deal with the fact that she has no place to go where she can be by herself and give way to her grief.

Nothing that she has achieved in her entire working life has resulted in the acquisition of such a private place. Instead, she has buried her husband, a baker who died of "white lung disease" and those children who survived the high rate of infant mortality fell victim to other ills of the late-Victorian underclass: immigration, prostitution, poor health, worse luck (Lohafer 475).

Ma Parker was a woman whose status in society was predetermined and fixed. Similarly, in Mansfield's 'Bliss', the reader is introduced to another fixed character, Bertha Young. Bertha is a 30-year old wife and mother who is a housewife embodying "the status of non-work" (248). Bertha Young is seen as planning a dinner party and, significantly, as becoming vulnerable to a series of erotic feelings which are first narcissistic, secondly, oriented toward another woman, and finally, erotically pointed at her male spouse. Thomas Dilworth states that in this story, Mansfield explores the homoerotic urge that many women feel but do not give into expressing (141). These urges are presented in the Freudian content as perfectly normal and as liberating.

However, Mansfield is seen by Dilworth as stopping before allowing her protagonist to become overly involved in these lesbian longings (142). It is no accident that Bertha Young shifts her desire from the female object, Miss Fulton, to the more legitimate object of her own husband. It is at this juncture that Mansfield makes it clear to the reader that Mr. Young and Miss Fulton are likely to be engaged in an affair of their own: as she is departing from the dinner party, he tells her she is adored and they arrange to meet "To-morrow" (Mansfield 185). For Bertha, who is clearly in the midst of a sexual awakening of some importance, this new knowledge of her husband's infidelity is undoubtedly shattering.

Dilworth says that it is extremely poignant that this knowledge should be given to Bertha immediately after her own sexual awakening and attraction to her husband (142). This poignancy is expressed in a motif of unplayed music. Metaphorically, Bertha has been a musical instrument that is about to be played for the first time; though a wife and mother and 30 years olds, she is spiritually and sexually 'untouched'. Bertha is a musical instrument; her husband is the musician. However, she learns that he has chosen to 'play' another woman, relegating her to the status of the unwanted 'other'.

Miss Fulton has literally displaced Bertha in which Dilworth calls "a brutal enactment of the Darwinian survival of the fittest" (144). Bertha and others in the story are also depicted in a Darwinian sense as little more than monkeys, symbolically referenced in the monkey patterned coat worn by Mrs. Norman Knight and the voice of the narrator, who described Mrs. Knight sans coat as looking very much like an intelligent monkey (Mansfield 178-9). Dilworth believes that the "monkey references introduce an element of satirical mockery by reminding the reader of the primate ancestry, and perhaps essence, of these effete, aesthetically cultivated, pretentious sophisticates, whose supper conversation is so banal" (144).

Alternatively, it is possible to consider 'Bliss' less as a Darwinian allegory of the survival of the fittest than as a Freudian "coming of age" allegory (D'Arcy 246). In this approach to the story and the character of Bertha Young, what is emphasised is the fact of a soon-to-be-frustrated sexual awakening initially directed toward the self, then toward the same gender, and finally toward the 'appropriate' heterosexual object. Bertha's 'bliss', as the title of the story suggest, is transitory; bliss can be experienced but not retained. For Bertha, says, D'Arcy, the departure of the guests at the dinner party will mark the beginning of a new relationship between Bertha and her husband - a relationship in which they will become as equals because of Bertha's awakening (247). However, it is not to Bertha that Mr. Young is looking for his own sexual fulfilment.

The realisation that she will not be the object of her husband's sexual interest is naturally devastating to Bertha, who is unlikely to feel such 'bliss' again. D'Arcy suggests that Bertha is presented in a superficial manner to illustrate Mansfield's belief that the society in which she and other women of her generation lived and moved demanded such superficiality