SOURCE: D'Arcy, Chantal Cornut-Gentille. “Katherine Mansfield's ‘Bliss’: ‘The Rare Fiddle’ as Emblem of the Political and Sexual Alienation of Woman.” Papers on Language & Literature 35, no. 3 (summer 1999): 244-69.

In the following essay, D'Arcy examines the political commentary and sexual politics found in “Bliss.”

In the final part of To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe, the amateur artist, is contemplating her painting and pondering on the elusive nature of mass and form:

Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron.

(Woolf 264)

Such a “visionary” insight helps establish the basic shape and nature of Katherine Mansfield's¹ short stories in that it immediately points to a certain “doubleness” in what, at first sight, could appear to be no more than dainty and sentimental little fictional...