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

摘要

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.