[In the following essay, Dilworth views evolution as a central theme in “Bliss” and deems the story as “a wonderful aesthetic achievement.”]

For such a popular and much-anthologized work, Katherine Mansfield's “Bliss” has generated sparse criticism. The aspect of the story that chiefly makes it so popular has also diminished its critical reputation: its element of contrast and surprise. With climactic simplicity, the narrative contrasts the erotic happiness of the protagonist throughout the story with its deflation (largely implied) at the end, when she discovers that her husband is unfaithful. So simple and emphatic, this contrast—it is not much of a plot—has led many, including T. S. Eliot, to assume that there is little to the story apart from the powerful effect of its final surprise, a disillusionment more felt than susceptible to interpretation (35). Virginia Woolf thinks the story a shallow example of “superficial smartness,” based on a concept that is “poor, cheap, not the vision of an interesting mind” (1: 179).¹ I want to demonstrate that they are wrong, that this story is a rich and protean work of art. Its parts and aspects resonate significantly on all four principal levels of imagination, which are, in order of deepening emotional intensity: satire or allegory, realism, romance, and myth. The story also accomplishes a rare effect, by which its form becomes symbolic. The meaning of its central imagery—the pear tree, garden, and moon—continually changes in a way that rhymes with the displacements of biological evolution—evolution being, though heretofore unnoticed as such, the most important thematic strand in the story. As a remarkably seamless union of form-and-content, “Bliss” is a wonderful aesthetic achievement.

At the beginning of the story, the 30-year-old protagonist, Bertha Young is returning home after ordering fruit for a dinner party that evening. For no specified reason, she is “overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss—absolute bliss” (95). It is a powerful but unfocused erotic emotion, such as anyone might feel in spring. The feeling is immediately identified as natural, for it is “as though you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe” (95). Her erotic feeling then acquires objects, which are, in sequence, symbolically narcissistic, female other, and male spousal. She directs her blissful attention to a “cold mirror” that “[gives] her back a woman, radiant, with smiling, trembling lips” (96). Then she looks at the beautiful pear tree in her garden, with which she identifies, partly because she has already planned to dress in colors that she only now realizes are those of the tree and garden. Then she is excited by newly arrived Pearl Fulton: “What was there in the touch of that cool arm that could fan—fan—start blazing—blazing—the fire of bliss that Bertha had not known what to do with?” (103). But Bertha is not so much attracted to Miss Fulton as aware that they share the same happiness. It was “as if they had said to each other: ‘You too?’” (103-04). The similarity between them is emphasized by each living in anticipation—“listening” (Bertha, 96; Miss Fulton, 103), which, in Miss Fulton, is suggested by her habitual posture of holding “her head a little on one side” (99, 103). Bertha's erotic feeling veers toward the homoerotic when she is with Miss Fulton but remains protean, essentially undefined in orientation and general in expression. It makes her feel “tender” (105) toward all her dinner guests. “Everything was good—was right. All that happened seemed to fill again her brimming cup of bliss” (105). But she then realizes that soon she and her husband, Harry, will be “alone together in the dark room—the warm bed” and “for the first time in her life Bertha Young desired her husband” (107). This is, for her, an important sexual awakening. Until this moment she has been “so cold,” although she and her husband had been “good palls”; but now she wants him “ardently! ardently! The word ached in her ardent body!” (108).

This is, I think, an accurate account of Bertha's erotic experience, although it contradicts many critics, who read the statement of Bertha's sexual desire for her husband as indicating that she is hiding from herself the true, lesbian nature of her sexuality. Perhaps this is what Armine Kotin Mortimer means when she contends, enigmatically, that Bertha's “homosexual desire is revealed only in the structures that hide it and keep it hidden even beyond the end of the story” (50). Walter E. Anderson (390) and Mary Burgan (60) assume that the cause of Bertha's initial experience of bliss, before arriving home, is Miss Fulton. Burgan thinks Miss Fulton has “seduced” Bertha (60). Vincent O'Sullivan thinks that Bertha focuses her desire upon her husband because she fears her lesbian attraction to Miss Fulton (149), whom Helen Nebeker also thinks is the real object of Bertha's passion (547). Pamela Dunbar carries these readings to their logical conclusion, which is that Bertha realizes that she and her husband “love the same woman” (142)—an interpretation that considerably diminishes the impact, and awful implications for Bertha, of the concluding revelation. What makes the lesbian interpretation unlikely is that we have it on indisputable authority that, in the end, Bertha sexually desires her husband. The source of this information is not Bertha but the omniscient voice, which is, as we shall see, not limited to Bertha's point of view. The omniscient voice unambiguously says that she ardently desires her husband sexually. This suggests that the earlier, ambiguous statement, “Bertha had fallen in love with [Miss Fulton], as she always did fall in love with beautiful women who had something strange about them” (99), is a colloquial exaggeration (Mortimer 50) using words that Bertha herself might have used without wishing to convey sexual interest. Of course, it is possible to feel lesbian attraction and then heterosexual attraction. What makes this improbable, however, is that the movement of Bertha's mind earlier is not that of a woman in love with Pearl Fulton. As she considers her dinner guests, Bertha thinks first of the Norman Knights, then of Eddie Warren, and only subsequently of Pearl Fulton (98-99); and in her happiness with the Knights and Warren, “she talked and laughed and positively forgot” until her husband arrived late “that Pearl Fulton had not turned up” (103). Someone in love would think of her beloved first. The lesbian reading may be influenced by Mansfield's own passionate lesbianism, in contrast to her tamer but ultimately preferred heterosexual monogamy. If Bertha were in any sense choosing between homosexuality and marriage—and I think she is not doing even that—she would be making the same choice that Mansfield made in life.

Shortly after feeling her aching, ardent desire for her husband, as the guests are departing, Bertha sees her husband with Miss Fulton at the door and reads his lips as he tells her, “I adore you” and then whispers, “Tomorrow,” and Bertha watches Miss Fulton “with her eyelids” answer “Yes” (109).² At this point, the reader may see in retrospect an amorous significance in Miss Fulton and Harry having both arrived late and both by taxi, though by separate taxis.

It is poignant that Bertha's sexual awakening should be followed so soon by her discovery of her husband's infidelity. This poignancy is expressed in a motif of unplayed music. Metaphorically, Bertha has been a musical instrument that is about to be played for the first time (Neaman 121). She wonders at the beginning of the story, “Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle” (95)? In harmony with this thought, although the dining-room is “quite chilly,” she throws off her coat (95). (For the reader and Mansfield, though not for Bertha, the phrase “rate fiddle” is an image of this story en abîme, since the adjective ‘rare’ anticipates the noun ‘violin,’ not ‘fiddle,’ a surprise-noun deflating expectation of Stradivarian specialness.) After dinner she twice says aloud about the piano, “What a pity someone does not play!” (107). She is a musical instrument; her husband, the musician. The music she is made for and longs for is ecstatic, orgasmic sex. Now her longing will not find fulfillment.

Miss Fulton has displaced Bertha in a brutal enactment of Darwinian survival of the fittest. The Darwinian theme is introduced by Mrs. Norman Knight wearing a coat “with a procession of black monkeys round the hem and up the fronts” (101).³ On her way to the dinner-party, the middle-class train passengers had stared at Mrs. Knight, and she had asked the woman beside her, “Haven't you ever seen a monkey before” (101), which implies that she, Mrs. Knight, is herself a monkey. And the omniscient narrator, probably speaking for Bertha, says, “a funnier thing still was that now her coat was off she did look like a very intelligent monkey” (101). That is, of course, precisely what she and every other human being is according to the popular conception of evolutionary theory. The monkey references introduce an element of satirical mockery by reminding the reader of the primate ancestry, and perhaps essence, of these effete, aesthetically cultivated, pretentious sophisticates, whose supper conversation is so banal. But references to monkeys also recall the momentous imaginative change brought about in the previous century by Darwin.

Immediately after the talk about monkeys, Mr. Knight irrelevantly quotes a verse from memory, “This is a sad, sad fall,” which serves unintentionally as a comment on the preceding talk of monkeys. Already the image of the fruit tree in the garden has evoked the Garden of Eden and the story of the fall.⁴ In relation to the Genesis myth, Darwin's theory of evolution represents a greater fall even than the biblical fall from grace, for the Darwinian fall is, at least for the theologically naïve, a fall out of the metaphysical sphere of being into mere animal biology. The juxtaposition here of Eden and monkeys recalls what was, in the Victorian Age, the primary result of the ascendancy of Darwinian theory: the generally felt traumatic realization that the biblical story is mere myth. This is paradise-lost lost.

Another guest at the dinner party, Eddie Warren, a fatuous poet, has just had an experience that, although apparently irrelevant to the story (and therefore apparently an aesthetic weakness), epitomizes the meaninglessness of life for post-Darwinian men and women (Mansfield's italics insist on an extreme upper-class accent):

I have had such a dreadful experience with a taxi-man; he was most sinister. I couldn't get him to stop. The more I knocked and called the faster he went. And in the moonlight this bizarre figure with the flattened head crouching over the li-ttle wheel. … I saw myself driving through Eternity in a timeless taxi.

(101-02)

The crouching taxi driver “with the flattened head” is simian. The taxicab of anyone's life is driven not by a monkey, perhaps, but by cosmological and biological nature that has no concern whatever for humanity. The contrast between human self-importance and biology moving (evolving) valuelessly through time also resonates symbolically in Mrs. Knight's statement, “We are victims of time and train” (108).

Part of this monkey-motif is Bertha's husband—who seems, as a companion, undesirable. The ripostes that he intends as witty are dull. To Bertha he describes Miss Fulton as “cold like all blonde women, with a touch, perhaps, of anaemia of the brain.” When Bertha says there is something behind Miss Fulton's posture and smile, Harry says, “Most likely it's a good stomach.” Such witless remarks are characteristic of him: “‘liver frozen, my dear girl’ or ‘pure flatulence’, or ‘kidney disease’, … and so on” (99). (Not very witty herself, Bertha, astonishingly, likes these rejoinders.) At the dinner he sexualizes his meal by verbally glorying “in his ‘shameless passion for the white flesh of the lobster’ and ‘the green of pistachio ices—green and cold like the eyelids of Egyptian dancers’” (104). One critic rightly calls him “a boor” (Burgan 64). Another calls him (by happy accident, for us) “an emotional primate” (Neaman 119). He is ape-like because witless and because he is sexually appetitive, since monkeys are traditionally associated with lust. In this and other respects, apishness may be suggested by his name—Harry, homonymous with ‘hairy’ as in the cliché “Hairy Ape.” (Fortuitously his full name, Harry Young, would become even more ape-evoking in 1949 with the appearance of Mighty Joe Young, a film about an oversized ape.)

In Darwinian terms he is nevertheless a good catch because he is aggressive, a good provider.⁵ He is highly competitive, with “his passion for fighting—for seeking in everything that came up against him another test of his power and of his courage” (103). This trait has served him well in business. Bertha realizes that “they didn't have to worry about money.” That is putting it mildly. He has provided her with an “absolutely satisfactory house and garden” in London (100), complete with maid, cook, and nanny. Bertha and her husband are members of a club (99). She can afford to wear jade. “And then there were books, and there was music”—which apparently means concerts—“and she had found a wonderful little dressmaker, and they were going abroad in the summer …” (100). However charmless, Harry earns a lot of money and for that alone may be worth competing for.

Her husband's selection of another woman has evolutionary resonance. Bertha is passed over by natural selection. She has lost the human race, which is really only an animal race. She loses Harry as her mate because her rival, not she, is the fittest.

Poor Bertha is not aggressive enough to survive as exclusive or primary mate even in the civilized jungle of upper-class London. She is ineffectual, having forgotten the house-key “as usual” (95). She finds it difficult to assert motherly claims over her own baby. She is sensitive to the nurse's signal “that meant she had come into the nursery at another wrong moment” (97). When the nurse tells her that the baby had clutched and tugged a dog's ear in the park that afternoon, “Bertha wanted to ask if it wasn't rather dangerous to let her clutch at a strange dog's ear. But she did not dare to. She stood watching them, her hands by her side, like the poor little girl in front of the rich little girl with the doll” (97). She manages to take over the feeding of her baby but, like a child herself, passively suffers the nanny's chiding, “Now, don't excite her after her supper. You know you do” (97). Bertha “loved” her baby but is unable to quite say so, saying instead, “You're nice—you're very nice! … I'm fond of you. I like you” (98). She is called away to the telephone by the nanny “coming back in triumph and seizing” the baby (98). On the phone, she is unable to break through inhibiting upper-class British mores or whatever it is that precludes her telling her husband how happy she is:

She couldn't absurdly cry: ‘Hasn't it been a divine day!’

‘What is it?’ rapped out the little voice.

‘Nothing. Entendu,’ said Bertha, and hung up the receiver, thinking how more than idiotic civilization was.

(98)

“Entendu” is an example of her speaking in language not authentically hers, which is another measure of weakness. Mansfield writes about Bertha to John Middleton Murry, “these words and expressions were not & couldn't be hers” (Letters [The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield] 2: 121).

Another aspect of ineffectuality and inauthenticity is what amounts to a motif of her deliberately not seeing or only minimally seeing, a motif suggesting that she prefers happiness to truth. “She hardly dared to look: into the mirror” (96); she tells the maid not to turn on the light (96); “she pressed her hands to her eyes” (100); as they all go into the drawing-room after supper, she says “don't turn up the light for a moment. It is so lovely” (105). This motif implies more than the ordinary limits of point of view. When she draws the parallel between her ardor for Harry and Pearl Fulton's feelings, she approaches the dangerous question of the object of Fulton's longing: “But then—” and breaks off (103), unwilling to risk an unhappy intuitive conclusion. Semi-consciously, at least, she epitomizes the cliché that Mansfield must have had in mind when giving her story its title, “Ignorance is bliss.” The cliché is false in a world of Darwinian struggle, where the more you know and the more you notice the better able you are to survive.

Most telling of all, Bertha is devoid of emotional response and initiative upon discovering her husband's infidelity. All she can say is, “‘Oh, what is going to happen now?’” (110). Utterly passive in the face of her changed circumstances, she is simply too weak emotionally to compete aggressively for her mate. She has just experienced the beginning of true erotic arousal and desire, but as a participant in Darwinian nature, in this particular struggle at least, Bertha is too little, too late.

Two of her dinner guests also seem inadequate, in ways that identify them as Darwinian losers in a literary-aesthetic sphere. Norman Knight is a theatrical producer for whom Michael Oat (not present at the party) is writing a play in which a man gives reasons for and against committing suicide. “And just as he has made up his mind either to do it or not to do it—curtain. Not half a bad idea,” Knight says. Eddie Warren responds, “I think I've come across the same idea in a lit-tle French review, quite unknown in England” (104). The idea was not new, however, and its source not obscure. It was dramatized 40 years before by Henrik Ibsen. In his play Ghosts (1881), a son is deteriorating mentally owing to inherited syphilis, which threatens to reduce him permanently to the condition of infancy. He gets his mother to promise that, if another attack occurs and has this effect, she will euthanize him with morphia pills. He then suffers the attack, regresses to infancy, and the curtain falls with the mother passionately torn between killing him and not.⁶ When Knight and Warren discuss Oat's idea, Ghosts had been well known in England for three decades. The enthusiasm of Oat and Knight for a 40-year old idea, and the failure of Warren to recognize the famous dramatic embodiment of that idea, indicates that these representatives of London's avant-garde are actually passé. The indirect reference to Ghosts may also be a subtle nod by Mansfield to Ibsen, one of the originators of modernism, whose grim realism is a literary precedent to that of this story.

The answer to Bertha's final question—“what is going to happen now?”—is strongly hinted at in the story's other love triangle, that between Bertha, her baby, and the nanny.⁷ As with the nanny, Bertha will be forced not so much to share her loved one with another woman as to give way to the other woman. She had complained to herself, “Why have a baby if it has to be kept … in another woman's arms?” Read ‘husband’ for “baby,” and the only response is “Why indeed?” Either he becomes a husband in name only or he ceases entirely to be her husband.

The imaginative level of realism in “Bliss” is Darwinian and heartless. It contradicts the imaginative level of romance, which had informed Bertha's point of view until her discovery of Harry's infidelity. The romance here is that of the Romantics, originating in the writing of the Earl of Shaftsbury and promulgated by Rousseau, who believed that man and nature exist in a benign harmony, that ‘natural’ means ‘good.’ (The widespread persistence of this romance is what gives this story its shocking power for most readers.) Bertha had felt at one with the lovely spring day and the flowering pear tree, but pathetic fallacy is, indeed, false. Underlying this nature-romance is the classical myth of the Golden Age, in which men, nature, and the gods lived in perfect harmony. There are no allusions to the Golden Age here; instead, the romance of sympathy between man and nature is annulled by Darwinian realism, a cancellation that has its symbol in the biblical myth of the fall.

The myth of paradise and its loss is suggested on the first page of the story, in which the primary images are Bertha's “bliss,” the “sun,” and “fruit.” Fruit is always disquieting in a story with Edenic evocations, and there is a lot of fruit in this story: “tangerines and apples stained with strawberry pink” (two fruits in one), “yellow pears, … white grapes … a big cluster of purple ones” (96), and the hint of fruit in Mrs. Knight's “orange” coat and yellow dress that seemed to Bertha made “of scraped banana skins” (101). (The banana may be the fruit that links evolution with the genesis myth that it replaces.) There is also, in the poem that Eddie Warren refers to, “tomato soup” (109), which is probably also “the beautiful red soup” served at dinner (104). Though often considered a vegetable, the tomato is a fruit.

The most striking evocation of Eden is, of course, the pear tree in the garden, an image that enthralls Bertha, though when she first sees it this evening she is disconcerted by what she also sees: “a gray cat, dragging its belly, crept across the lawn, and a black one, its shadow, trailed after. The sight of them, so intent and so quick, gave Bertha a curious shiver” (100). The cat is so intent and low-to-the-ground because it is hunting, true to its predatory Darwinian nature. “Dragging its belly,” it may evoke the biblical serpent, which, after successfully tempting Eve—and, through Eve, Adam—is cursed by God to go upon its “belly” (Genesis 3:14, Neaman 119-20). The cat is associated with Miss Fulton at the end of the story, when she follows Warren out “like the black cat following the grey cat” (109). She may be the serpent in this paradisal garden, bringing about Bertha's fall from bliss.

Because Darwinian realism overrides biblical perspective, there is nothing moral or immoral in any of this. Darwinian theory was the primary intellectual impetus in the shift from Judeo-Christian morality to the moral ‘relativity’ of the modern world, which Harry and Miss Fulton epitomize by their behavior. There probably remains, however, a deliberate tension between Darwinian animal amorality and reader response, which tends to be unregenerately moral and therefore resists, or at least regrets, the fall into biological valuelessness.

Relativity and the evolutionary theme are evoked in the imagery of the pear tree as it changes or ‘evolves’ in significance. Bertha first sees it against the far wall of the garden: “a tall, slender pear tree in fullest, richest bloom; it stood perfect, as though becalmed against the jade-green sky. Bertha couldn't help feeling, even from this distance that it had not a single bud or a faded petal.” All in flower, it symbolizes the height of sexual readiness, since flowers are sexual organs. “Down below, in the garden beds, the red and yellow tulips, heavy with flowers,” phallic but not fully erect, “seemed to lean upon the dusk” (99-100). These tulips suggest that even at this point she unconsciously regards herself as the object of some degree of heterosexual desire. She “seemed to see … the lovely pear tree with its wide open blossoms as a symbol of her own life,” and she dresses, as if in imitation of the tree, in “a white dress, a string of jade beads, green shoes and stockings. It wasn't intentional. She had thought of this scheme hours before.” Serendipity makes the association seem all the more right. As she comes down from dressing she is the tree metaphorically, “her petals rustled softly into the hall” (100).

In its second appearance, the tree changes significance. Now its meaning is not solely or even primarily relative to Bertha. Miss Fulton has arrived, looking like the moon—which Warren has mentioned: “there is a moon, you know” (102)—a full moon, “that circle of unearthly light” (106), to match Pearl Fulton's first name and her surname and her appearance. She is “all in silver, with a silver fillet binding her pale blonde hair” (103). Her fingers “were so pale a light seemed to come from them” (105). After dinner, Bertha and she “stood side by side looking at the slender, flowering tree. Although it was so still it seemed, like the flame of a candle, to stretch up, to point, to quiver in the bright air, to grow as they gazed—almost to touch the rim of the round, silver moon.” Now it seems to be Miss Fulton, first of all, for whom the image has meaning: “And did Miss Fulton murmur: ‘Yes. Just that.’ Or did Bertha dream it?” (106)

The terms of the image have changed significantly since Bertha's initial, private contemplation of the tree. To Miss Fulton, the tree is not symbolic of Bertha. Nor is it symbolic of Miss Fulton. The tree is now phallic, seeming “like the flame of a candle, to stretch up, to point, to quiver, … to grow” toward imminent intercourse with the feminine “round, silver moon,” with which Miss Fulton has good reason to identify. Here the omniscient voice has diverged—as, of course, it is free to do—from Bertha's point of view and is either autonomous or adopts Miss Fulton's perspective. Certainly the reader identifies Miss Fulton with the moon, and, knowing herself the object of Harry's desire, she probably sees the tree as an image of Harry, phallic, beautiful, and adulterous, who is soon to have intercourse—again, no doubt—with her languorous self. Like Bertha, however, the reader cannot yet share Miss Fulton's awareness, so that the imagery remains temporarily unreadable.⁸ But as she leaves the house, Miss Fulton holds Bertha's hand and murmurs appreciatively, “Your lovely pear tree” (109). The reader knows—though Bertha cannot, since she has not had the benefit of reading the passage in which the tree is phallically transformed—that Miss Fulton is referring to Harry and might as well be saying, ‘Your lovely husband.’ The two women have observed the tree together from “a balcony” (99) like two Juliets competing for the attention of a single Romeo.

The last sentence of the story underlines the deflation of the romance in which nature is in harmony with Bertha: “the pear tree was as lovely as ever and as full of flower and as still” (109). Now it has no positive meaning for her or for the reader. It is merely an aspect of impartial, heartless Darwinian nature. The significance of the image of the tree has evolved: from Bertha's subjective erotic bliss, to the grosser sexual relationship of Miss Fulton with Harry, to the non-significance of mere biological competition, in which beauty and erotic eagerness are merely advantages. Even in this final reduction to apparent non-significance, however, there may be a faint symbolic resonance. Mansfield's pear tree may evoke—it certainly has for its literary antecedent—the pear tree of Chaucer's “Merchant's Tale,” a tree in which a young wife married to an aged knight commits adultery with the knight's young squire. That, too, is a clear, though pre-Darwinian, instance of natural selection.⁹

As we have begun to see, the names of characters are allegorically significant in a way that sharpens the story's satirical edge. Although Bertha Young has given birth and is 30 years old, she is “Young,” more girlish than womanly. Pearl Fulton is obviously, in first and last names, lunar. Her first name may evoke the biblical “pearl of great price” that a man sells all he has to obtain. It certainly identifies her with the pear, both fruit and tree, since the name ‘Pearl’ contains, and is four-fifths, ‘pear.’¹⁰ Eddie Warren's surname may evoke the warrens in which rabbits procreate so prolifically.¹¹ Harry describes a woman who is sexually involved with the unoriginal playwright Michael Oat—a name, suggestive of inadequacy since he has only one oat, wild or (more probably) tame. Even the title of Oat's play, Love in False Teeth, suggests a lack of virility and fertility. The Norman Knights evoke the Norman Conquest, which is, in English history, the great social-military equivalent of Darwinian competition and survival of the fittest. Such names diminish emotion for the sake of satire, which is, along with allegory, the imaginative level that is most purely intellectual. Satire and the names that generate it give the story a formal aspect of heartlessness to match its Darwinian theme and help remove it, as T. S. Eliot notices (36), from morality—which is part of a larger world of human love and meaning that is lost in the imaginative fall to Darwinism, lost as utterly as was the paradise of biblical myth.

Notes

1. Recent critics have basically agreed with Eliot and Woolf. Emphasizing the protagonist's awareness of affinity with Miss Fulton, which they see as lesbian infatuation, Vincent O'Sullivan (143) and Rhoda Nathan (Katherine Mansfield 73, 74) write that the story is famous for its “epiphany.” Sylvia Berkman sees plot as the only distinctive element in the story (156, 164).

2. Bertha's husband and Miss Fulton do not, as a series of critics have inexplicably written, “kiss.” Nor do they “embrace,” as Mortimer claims (46). Their physical interaction is limited to him touching her shoulders to turn her “violently” toward him and their whispering to one another.

3. Judith S. Neaman is the only critic previously to see these monkeys as evoking “Darwinian evolutionary theory” (118) but she discerns in the association no significant thematic implications.

4. Critics who have noted the allusion to Eden include Magalaner (77), Berkman (252), Zorn (146), and, most thoroughly and insightfully, Neaman (117, 118).

5. For this insight I am indebted to conversation with Dana Dragunoiu, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton.

6. For the similarity between Oat's idea for a play and Ibsen's Ghosts, I am indebted to conversation with William Blissett, professor emeritus at the University of Toronto.

7. Mortimer was the first to see the tension between Bertha and the nanny over the baby as “a triangle” (48-49). She associates Bertha in the triangle of Bertha-Harry-Miss Fulton with “the child who discovers her desire for her father and immediately thereupon discovers that she is merely repeating her mother's desire” (49)—an idea that violates the terms of the first triangle, whose youthful member is not a child capable of such discovery, but a baby, who is therefore, I think, merely the love object, and, although female, a counterpart to the husband the two women are competing for—if Bertha can be imagined as competing.

8. My reading of this scene is in agreement with that of Kate Fullbrook (101). Burgan notes that the scene suggests “phallic force” but does not associate this force with Harry in Miss Fulton's awareness (65). Reading what Mortimer calls “the second story,” a product of rereading after experiencing the surprise ending, Mortimer notes that the tree is “suggestively phallic” and sees it “as an index” of Miss Fulton's bliss (43). For critics who prematurely formulate their interpretation at this point in their reading, in what Mortimer calls “the first story,” the imagery is confusing or their interpretations forced. Magalaner sees the phallic tree as symbolizing “both Harry and his wife” (79) and blames Mansfield for the confusion. Morrow writes that the scene is phallic and “vaginal” because Bertha “doesn't recognize the possibility of lesbian lovemaking” and has only experienced sex with her husband (55). Anderson—and Dunbar repeats him (132)—sees the phallic aspect of the tree as symbolizing “the ‘masculine’ part of Bertha's “sexual feelings,” which “eludes her conscious recognition” (400).

9. For remembering this earlier, Chaucerean pear tree, I am indebted to conversation with Anita Moss, a professor at the University of North Carolina.

10. For the insight about ‘Pearl’ resembling ‘pear,’ I am indebted to Mary Elizabeth Crowell a second-year English major at the University of Windsor. Burgan notes that Pearl is the name of the lost child in Mansfield's story “How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped” and of the protagonist in Mansfield's Saffron, and goes on to give other, clitoral-lesbian associations (59).

11. Warren's surname was initially Wangle, which has detumescent connotations—“to move loosely or shakily on its base or place of attachment” (OED)—and connotations of fraudulence (to wiggle to extricate oneself). When John Middleton Murry objected to the surname as striking “a false note” (Letters 2: 122), Mansfield changed it to Warren.

Works Cited

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