Katherine Mansfield's story, "Bliss," is about sex. Yet, because Bertha's sexuality does not manifest itself in an immediate desire for a heterosexual sexual encounter it is difficult to determine how sexuality figures in the story. The presentation of sexuality in Mansfield's stories is so unique that most critics contributing to Jan Pilditch's The Critical Response to Katherine Mansfield do not realize how deeply sexuality figures in the stories and do not refer to it in their analyses. Cherry Hankin theorizes that Mansfield's stories are about the psychological impact on a character when fantasy and reality conflict, yet she never defines fantasy as sexual, and feels the fantasy, in "Bliss" that is destroyed is that Bertha and Pearl are "‘creatures of another world'" (Pilditch, 188). Likewise, one anonymous reviewer, who fails to identify Bertha's bliss as a sexual manifestation, writes, "It was an illusion. The intercommunication was due, not to a magic of mutual comprehension......
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Approximate Word Count: 2847
Approximate Pages: 11 (260 words per double-spaced page) |