BLISSFUL THINKING: KATHERINE MANSFIELD AND THE EN-GENDERING OF MODERNIST FICTION

Abstract

The ideology (both aesthetic, authorial and general) of the modernist text has been seen as refractory to the designs of critics attempting to trace the development of a female aesthetics which is also an aesthetics of modernity. Yet a broader definition of the modernist paradigm, stressing its anti-realist and anti-organicist principles, gives a certain room for manoeuvre in the reappraisal of women's r a s which actually adapt the paradigm to an implicit questioning of dominant notions of sexuality and gender. Such a text is Katherine Mansfield's «Bliss», which, though berated by both masculinist and feminist critics for its perpetuation of the “feminine” values of a sentimental poetics, constitutes a subtle modernist critique of the construct of femininity. The indeterminacy of “Bliss” its silences, ambiguities and open-ended structure, foster an important “negative knowledge” of the social conditions which prevent its protagonist from fully realizing her emotional desires. In doing so, it could be said to stand at the forefront of a radical female aesthetics.