A Study of the Multi Dimensional function of the Image of the Pear Tree in Mansfield's Short Story Bliss

Abstract

Kathleen Mansfield  (1888 –1923)1  is one of the outstanding twentieth century short story writers   and   a  poetess whose poems reveal her overwhelming interest in using nature imagery to enhance  the social , moral and psychological  ideas in her work. Kathleen Mansfield was born and brought up in New Zealand . She left for Great Britain in 1908 , where she encountered modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf and ,eventually , they became close friends .² Mansfield  read  the works of Marcel Proust, Wordsworth, Coleridge, T.S. Eliot  , Oscar Wild  and other English writers of the early twentieth century.  Her stories often focus on moments of crisis  which  cover  a short period of time , approximately a day , in which the central character passes from a stage of  innocence to personal and social awareness³ .

Mrs. Dalloway (1925) ⁴ is a novel by Virginia Woolf which details a day in the life of the heroine, Clarissa Dalloway who prepares for a party to be held in the evening. Katherine  Mansfield 's  short story  Bliss ⁵( first published in The English Review in 1920 and later in the collection  Bliss and  Other Stories,1922 )  also  describes a day in the heroine , Bertha Young's  life . Like Clarissa Dalloway, Bertha Young  is preparing for a  grand dinner party in the evening in her own house. Unlike Mrs. Dalloway ,who  seems miserable and totally discontented with her family and her married life to her husband Richard, we first meet Bertha Young  in a state of rapture  , reflecting  her transient  happiness and contentment with everything around her .  The experiences of the party for the latter climaxes into  a great disappointment and resignation as she realizes her husband's deception and her own naive  perception of the true   meaning of the status of  the bliss in her life .

However, at the end of her party ,Mrs. Dalloway realizes that all her miseries and negative feelings are mere self delusions related to the neuroses of the middle age. She discovers that the true meaning of happiness and fulfillment in her life resides in being   close to her family ties and responsibilities as a wife and a mother.  The experiences of the party result  in  similar  crucial awakening in the life of Bertha Young  , but in a totally  opposite  direction:   The status of bliss and  anxiety  she  has been  experiencing  at the start of the party changes into utter misery  coupled with her painful recognition of being  patronized by  her domineering  and selfish  husband . Her  perception   of her true female position  reinforces a new  understanding  of the meaning of  bliss in her life . She realizes that  complete happiness  or rapture is either non –existent or superficially achieved within the social reality of male domination and  female  role playing .

As a modern writer, Katherine Mansfield  adopts  different   means  , such as  magic realism, symbolism ,psychoanalysis, Marxism and feminist theories in delineating her female  protagonist's predicament  and her ultimate transformation.  She also employs   poetic and dramatic techniques for the same purposes in the story.  This paper   attempts to focus  especially   on  Mansfield's   three dimensional  use  of   the pear tree  in foreshadowing    the  heroine's  odyssey towards  self – reckoning   , which is innovative in essence .Above all , Mansfield   uses  the pear tree as a symbol   that  constantly shifts   in meaning and  significance in the course of the narrative  . In the early parts of the story the image of the  pear tree  symbolizes  of the heroine 's  naivety  and blindness to reality  . Yet , throughout  the story   the image of the pear tree  becomes  a motif  associated with the heroine's manner of perception of her state  of  being in bliss  . From this perspective ,  it  submerges into a  sublime means  for   creating harmony  ,unity  and coherence between the essential events of the one day in the heroine's life  .    At the end of Mansfield's narrative the  peer tree  submerges into  a sublime element t  epiphany  which   engenders in Bertha's final  self   recognition   .

This  paper will be divided into four  sections. The first section is an introduction which states the main ideas of the study. Section two focuses on the central character ,  Bertha Young's  tendency  to self delusion  .  Section  three provide  a through analyses of the role of the pear in Bertha's journey towards  traumatic  self realization    . Section four highlights  the main findings of the paper.