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영어

The purpose of this paper is to study a feminine mode of writing which tries to surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system in “Bliss” of Katherine Mansfield, who achieved a wonderful aesthetic balance between form and subject in terms of protean images and symbols and an ironic subversion of traditional narrative story patterns. As an important and representative feminine text, “Bliss” cannot fail to be more than subversive and controversial in depicting the distinctive nature of women’s sexual desire by transferring women from object to subject position and focussing upon this subject as a being of ardent, though repressed, passions. In “Bliss” Mansfield portrays Bertha’s dedicated and consistent, if subconscious, attempt to find an objective correlative for her feeling of ‘absolute bliss’. This bliss she experiences blossoms out of her depth as a homoerotic desire for Pearl Fulton. Through her awakening moment of feminine communion, she finds her feminine sexuality and her potentiality of being a woman of her own. However, the ironic reversal of the story’s ending puts the question of women’s subjectivity and consequent possibility of feminine writing into unexpected doubt. Bertha’s heavenly bliss and earthly frustration represent the writer’s achievement and limits of her writing at once in her society of snobbism and sterile pretensions of men. Mansfield projects into Bertha, the artist manque, her own desire of self-revelation as an alien woman in the English artist society.