The Metamorphosis of Bertha in Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss

Catherine · Mansfield 's happiness in Catherine · Mansfield' s "happiness" in the Bertha version is a very interesting story full of potential meanings and themes. In the first reading, it seems a simple story about the unforgettable happiness of a woman one day only when she discovers that her husband is cheating. This is a correct explanation, but after reading the second time, I can see more obvious things. "Happiness" is a story of a vibrant young woman, social criticism, and sexual revolution.

As a writer, Katherine Mansfield is particularly interested in exploring women's identity and sexual behavior. Many of her female characters - blessed Berta Young, Ada Moss in the picture, and Miss Brill in the short story with this name - showed a genuinely identity crisis. Indeed, in many cases, it can be said that women's characters in Mansfield have fragmentary identities, they show that they are trying to integrate internal and external self into the narrowness of male-dominated society. Like other Modernist writers, Mansfield focuses on the character's internal life, not the outside world.

"Blur" One of the earliest short stories published by Mansfield published in 1918, "happiness" focused on young wife and mother Bersa Young. Her new friend, a beautiful social association named Pearl, attended the party, and as Mr. Laura was at the "Garden Party", Mansfield slightly hinted at the feelings she felt in her heroine It was. Emotion Does Bertha like pearls? Does she really want a husband? But at the end of dinner, at the end of the story, Bertha will learn to confuse her whole world. Before you finish reading, you will like tomato soup bowl as well.

Among these two short stories, Catherine Mansfield shows us the end of love (the end). In "happiness", Bertha Young is absorbed in her life as a young, married mother, but we feel her vulnerability from the beginning. She was so happy that she felt "swallowing a wonderful sun ..." and the reader will soon notice that this happiness does not follow the literary society, the short stories that begin peace quickly destroy It will be done. Bertha is cowardly, her baby nurse (nanny) controls her and regrets that her baby grew up with "other woman's arms". Her pain is psychological, Mansfield shows us of her husband 's rudeness. He is a person who "hears" his answer (he is aware of the active use of onomatopoeia verbs). We witnessed the pain of Berta. When she saw her husband's intimate moment with other women, and her dreams were all broken.