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Bliss
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Literary Devices
In medias res
Like many of Mansfield’s stories, “Bliss” begins in the middle of a pivotal experience or in the middle of the action. The story doesn’t follow a narrative triangle with a defined and lengthy exposition, with rising action leading to the turning point. Instead, the story supplies the basic facts—Bertha is 30 but still naïve—and then kicks off the crucial moment. Bertha questions what happens when one literally turns the corner of their street while she also questions the figurative corner that she is turning in her developing self-awareness. She doesn’t know what to do with the deliriously happy feelings she is experiencing. We don’t know why she is feeling them, but through the in medias res device, the answers are revealed as the story unfolds.
Foreshadowing
Although the dominant literary device in this story, a unique reality is that the foreshadowing isn’t appreciated until the ending. Because of the limited omniscient narration, what is initially perceived as mere plot detail becomes revelatory when the love triangle is exposed.
In many ways—except for the most crucial—Bertha recognizes that Harry creates a persona. When she thinks about his tendency to make himself important by rushing around, she rightly predicts how that scene will play out. She knows that “he would make a great point of coming into the drawing-room, extravagantly cool and collected” (Paragraph 77). This is an interesting example of foreshadowing. At first reading, the detail plays as just a character trait. It even seems to show that Bertha has a good understanding of her husband. But Harry’s final behavior reveals how this detail in fact hints at the ending. “‘I’ll shut up shop,’ said Harry, extravagantly cool and collected”—clever parallelism and painful irony (Paragraph 156). Bertha knows so much and so little about her husband.
Mr. Norman Knight makes a toss away comment as he and his wife are passing through the hallway. He stops in front of the baby’s pram and glibly quotes, “This is a sad, sad fall!” (Paragraph 62).This statement appears to characterize Mug as being literary and clever, but it foreshadows Bertha’s epiphany. The knowledge of her husband’s infidelity and its subsequent destruction of her perfect life is also a sad, sad fall.
Bertha hopes that while she is making the after-dinner coffee, Pearl will give a sign. This will be a sign that Bertha has correctly guessed that Pearl’s mood exactly matches her own. She recognizes that this type of affinity is rare, and she places tremendous weight on the sign. Bertha confesses that “what she meant by that [the sign] she did not know, and what would happen after that she could not imagine” (Paragraph 103). This powerfully foreshadows what does happen and what she ultimately knows.
Polysyndeton
This literally device uses multiple repetitions of the same conjunction, in this case the word “and.” Polysyndeton is used for a variety of purposes, such as adding rhythm—a poetic device—to a prose passage. This rhythm also simulates energy and restlessness, two qualities that typify Bertha. Notice the repetition of the word “and” in this passage and the way the repetition adds rhythm and restless energy to Bertha’s thoughts:
They had this absolutely satisfactory house and garden. And friends—modern, thrilling friends, writers and painters and poets or people keen on social questions—just the kind of friends they wanted. And then there were books, and there was music, and she had found a wonderful little dressmaker, and they were going abroad in the summer, and their new cook made the most superb omelettes (Paragraph 53).
Another function of polysyndeton is to attribute youthful qualities to the subject. The syntactic pattern reveals Bertha’s naivety and her shallow, immature nature seen in the things she values: dresses and omelets. Polysyndeton sometimes mimics a child’s tendency to create run-on sentences in their excitement to tell a story. Mansfield uses the device in this manner when Nanny whispers, “We went to the park and I sat down on a chair and took her out of the pram and a big dog came along and put its head on my knee and she clutched its ear, tugged it. Oh, you should have seen her” (Paragraph 20). In this case, Nanny’s speech pattern is derogatory, implying that the character is simple and incapable of seeing the danger in tugging the ear of a large, strange dog.
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By Katherine Mansfield
