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Corporeality and Femininity: Projection and Reflection in Mansfield and Woolf

Katherine Mansfields short story Bliss is a telling piece on Mansfields
treatment of female sexuality and identity, whose approach towards the writing matter
differs sharply from Virginia Woolfs. In Bliss, the protagonist Bertha dances both
figuratively and linguistically around the effusive and overwhelming emotions that are
trapped inside of her. Although she is in constant struggle to disambiguate her vague and
indistinct passions, she shirks and resists all moments which approach understanding
moments usually occurring in passages involving Bertha and Pearl Fulton, a female guest
who has attracted her unusual sensitivities. These passages involving Pearl are elliptically
constructed, its diction repetitious and confused; moreover, the scenes describing
Berthas feelings and relationship towards Pearl suggest a homoerotic tension, which
Bertha misunderstands as sexual desire for her husband, who has thus far been sexually
ill-received. However, Berthas lesbian tendencies are only hinted at, and its undecided
role is best depicted through the pear tree symbol; the pear tree is at once tall and slender,
reaching for as if penetrating the silvery moon represented in the silvery figure of Pearl
yet its flowers are also in full blossom, evoking the receptiveness of female sensuality.
The pear tree is in effect an androgynous symbol, an intermediate metaphor which Bertha
is never fully aware of. This disparity between the hints of sexual freedom (freedom to
explore other bodies, sexual frankness) and Berthas resistance and confusion of it is
circuitous and frustrating throughout the story. However, Mansfields style and method
here resembles her willingness to explore albeit with a satirical bent the frank issues
of female sexuality and identity which Woolf abhors as subject matter. As referenced

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through works such as A Room of Ones Own, Woolfs thoughts towards the issue of
feminine sexuality is entirely different; she writes that when a woman comes to write a
novel, she will find that she is perpetually wishing to alter the established values to
make serious what appears insignificant to man, and trivial what is to him important
(Woolf 146). She specifically engages the treatment of patriarchal subjects which were
predominant in literary culture, and which privileged conventional plots and relationships
adhering to patriarchal values. Woolf challenges this approach by advocating a feminine
sensibility in the everyday, or what she would call the experience of Monday or
Tuesday. As revealed in the early story An Unwritten Novel, and in portraits of
figures in her later works, Woolf writes against the literary inadequacies inherent within
male modes of writing; at the same time, Woolf traverses a different field of feminine
critique from that of Mansfield.
In this essay, I argue that Mansfield and Woolf insist on different modes of
writing in relating the topic of female sexuality and female identity; Mansfield seeks to
expose the corporeal possibilities open to women, while Woolf though linked to
sexually traumatic incidents herself resists such possibilities in search of a new means
of expression.
It is never explicitly revealed in Mansfields Bliss whether Pearl shares
Berthas strange and sudden feeling of bliss; it is Berthas perspective that we receive,
and her biases and assumptions are riddled throughout the story, down to the very
linguistic elements through which the diction is constructed. Berthas experience is a
homoerotic one, culminating in the anticipated entrance of Pearl at Berthas house, whose
arrival is welcomed by effusive affection, with a cool touch that could fan fan start

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blazing blazing the fire of bliss that Bertha did not know what to do with?
(Mansfield 150). This internal combustion of emotion, or "bliss", has been channeled
throughout the story into various outlets -- through marveling at her home dcor (144);
through holding her baby girl (145); through hugging her sofa cushion (147); and finally
through viewing the pear tree (147). The pear tree best crystallizes her inner feelings,
especially the feelings characterizing the corporeal body and sex yet this symbol of her
own life (147) continues to remain ambiguous throughout the story. The pear tree is
described "with its wide open blossoms" (147) and as tall, slender" (147); it is
simultaneously effeminate and masculine. The open blossoms resemble feminine
sexuality, pure and at the end of receiving; in one instance her petals rustled softly into
the hall, and she kissed Mrs. Norman Knight (148), displaying a torrent of affection for
her various guests. Yet the tall confidence of the tree stalk continues to quiver in the
bright air, to grow taller and taller almost to touch the rim of the round, silver moon
(153). It is an image of male assertion, attempting to reach or even pierce the elusive
silvery moon, symbolized by Pearl Fulton. Despite its flowery, effeminate characteristics,
the tree is at times tall and slender, and Bertha couldnt help feeling that it had not a
single bud or a faded petal (147). This is a moment when the tree literally loses its
feminine qualities, stripped of its buds and petals; in a sense, the pear tree crystallizes
into an androgynous symbol, at once female and male.
If the pear tree truly is a symbol of her own life (147), then the final projection
of her bliss on the figure of Pearl should represent her end desire unfortunately, the
symbol of the pear tree fails to offer a conclusive harmony between her traditional
relationship to her husband, and her homoerotic desires for Pearl. Somehow, in the scene

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where the two women examine the tree together, Berthas bliss becomes Pearls or is
projected onto her, as Bertha attempts to reach for that "blissful treasure that burned in
their bosoms" (153, emphasis mine) yet this "treasure" remains as vague as earlier
references to her excited bliss. Does her "burning treasure" demonstrate an explicitly
sexual desire for Pearl, or does it reveal a hypersensitive flaring up of female sensuality?
From what end does her bliss originate is it love for Harry, or is it desire for Pearl?
These questions are never explicitly resolved, and we are left merely with the ambiguous
"sign" which Bertha awaits for in her imagination.
It is another thing that Bertha is unaware of the ambiguities which surround her
sexual identity; although she is curious to discover the latent meaning behind her bliss,
she is unable to grasp the hints behind the varied signposts which guide her throughout
the story. Pearl represents the central sign, the conduit through which Bertha projects her
unknown desires; she finds Pearl to be rarely, wonderfully frank, but the certain point
was there, and beyond that she would not go (146). Here we find Pearl as frank it
begs the question of what Bertha means by that; if it is a kind of sexual frankness, then it
is also an aspect which Bertha cannot reclaim for herself, for Bertha intuitively delineates
a line which she would not cross. She immediately asks if there was anything beyond
it? her husband says no, but Bertha wouldnt agree with him; not yet, at any rate
(146). The not yet in the passage represents her silent desires, a tiny slip left dangling
between two clauses. In addition to Pearl, further ambiguities arise in Berthas
relationship to her husband. Bertha's relationship with Harry is described as lukewarm
and cold, lacking the parallel to Berthas rising passions; they were "so frank with each
other such good pals. That was the best of being modern" (154). Bertha compares her

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relationship with Harry as modern or civilized; however, her gratitude towards a modern
relationship is ambivalent, as she considers "how idiotic civilization is... to keep [a body]
shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle" (143). Thus we conceive her modern
relationship with Harry as in fact cold and sterile, shut up in a case, confined and reduced
to the status of just being good pals. If this were so, what explains her passionate
fervor? Towards the end of the story, Bertha engages in an imaginative conversation with
her husband in bed, relating to him her ambiguous "moments" with Pearl, as she shall
try to tell you when we are in bed to-night what has been happening. What she and I have
shared (154). By means of mental association, it is almost as if Pearl has managed to
creep into her private, sexual life in the bed chamber. It is not surprising that soon after,
for the first time, she feels sexual desire for her husband. Again, it is not hard to
distinguish through association that this sexual desire may be a projection of her feelings
towards Pearl. Soon after Bertha realizes that her relationship with Harry has been
primarily cold and friendly; Bertha immediately chokes, wondering what that feeling of
bliss had been leading up to? But then then (154). This is a pivotal moment for
Bertha, because she finally confronts the issue as to why Pearl could be involved in this
private, sexual matter with Harry it is precisely because the frank desires she feels for
Pearl has been confused for the cold Harry. But this is not enough; the confrontation ends
with an abrupt, elliptical dash. We find the same diction and linguistic elements
throughout the story repetition appears whenever Bertha turns her thoughts to Pearl, as
when she grabs a hold of Pearl's arm upon her arrival, which spawns a series of fan fan
start blazing blazing" (150). Earlier, when she embraces her body freed from the
rare, rare fiddle, she immediately retracts, claiming no, that about the fiddle is not

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quite what I mean" (143). This style of erratic diction parallels the passages in which
Bertha experiences passionate "bliss", and it parallels the passages in which Bertha
attempts to confront issues relating to her sexual identity. Bertha resists answering the
questions and ambiguities behind her sexual identity and desires. Her experience of
femininity is constantly challenged throughout the story, until the very end where she is
distraught not only by the fact that Harry loves Pearl, but by the question as to whether
she misses Harrys unrequited love, or simply desires Pearls unique frankness.
Destabilized, she looks out the window and echoes the lovely pear tree pear tree pear
tree! (156) but like its repetitious diction, the pear tree is not a stable force; it, too, is a
symbol of androgyny and ambiguity, unable to fully decide on its representation.
One mode of interpretation towards the androgynous relationship conceived for
Bertha whose passionate forays of "bliss" hovers curiously both towards and away from
Pearl is that Mansfield is satirizing the reluctant and taboo need for sexual freedom in
women. Mansfield teases the reader with suggestions that Bertha is on the verge of
sexually reconciling herself with her true passions free to explore the vague and
amorphous "bliss" burning inside of her, an effeminate sensuality seemingly linked to her
aggressive advance and signals towards Pearl. Yet at the same time Bertha is ignorant
and resists sexual definition, characterized by the androgynous symbol of the pear tree; to
this end, Mansfield strings us along with the bait (the idea of sexual frankness), but
refuses to satisfy us with a resolution. To broaden this perspective in scope, Mansfield as
a woman writer is exercising her own freedom to write about female sexuality in this
case, a story of a love triangle filled with hints of lesbianism. Woolf chastises this literary
style of sexual frankness, considering the story a shallow, maudlin tale of lesbianism

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(Neaman 249). To better appreciate the critical distance that Woolf establishes in her
writing matter from Mansfields, we must briefly look at Woolfs ideas on women writers
and their relationship to femininity.
In The Flaw in the Centre: Writing as Hymenal Rupture in Virginia Woolfs
Work, Patricia Moran discusses the metaphorical relationship between writing and
breaking the hymen:
A Room of One's Own tie Woolf's preoccupation with the structural 'flaw in the
centre' of women's texts to an unspoken, unconscious anxiety that breaking
silence for women is a violation of female chastity; over and over again Woolf
figures that violation as an agonizing 'rending and tearing' at the 'root' of the
woman writer's 'being'... it soon becomes clear that the 'great hole' speaks to
Woolf's internalized belief that breaking silence for women is as traumatic as the
rupture of the virgin's hymen' ... the act of breaking 'chaste' silence is an act of
such defiance and compulsion that it results in stillborn or illicit language and
acute mental anguish Woolf suggests that the freedom of the mind depends
upon the sexual freedom of the body, yet in acting upon either freedom, the
woman writer... inevitably becomes damaged goods -- and her works reflects that
damage. (Moran 7).
Woolf is clearly haunted by the literary constraints of her time particularly the
dominant patriarchy which dictated appropriate subject matter and acceptable modes
of writing. Woolf relates female textuality to the corporeal experience of sex writing
within a male-dominated craft is the equivalent to unchaste activity, rupturing the
prized virginal silence. She does not actually advocate for feminine silence; in fact, she
later extols the virtues of a ruptured text, and believing that the woman writer, in
breaking her silence and discussing the everyday values belonging to feminine
sensibilities is in fact an empowered and repossessed figure. However, Woolfs branch
of feminine values and literary subject matter differs sharply from Mansfields; Woolfs
advocacy for a rupture is aesthetic at best; her corporeal analogy is ironic because there is
little evidence to suggest that Woolf engages with topics of female corporeal freedom and

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sexual frankness. Throughout Woolfs fictional works, we find female characters that are
extremely sensitive to the private domain of feminine concerns and values; however, we
see little self-reflective behavior in relation to sex and the body, with figures literally
shying away from the looking-glass.
This does not mean that Woolfs representation of feminine experience is
inadequate or lacking; Woolf is already well known for working against the literary
conventions of the day, which were dominated by male value systems and male interests.
In fact, Woolf has demonstrated an ability to have fun while doing this, too. Using An
Unwritten Novel as a short story to parallel Mansfields, we find an anonymous woman
sitting on a train, spinning a fictional story that parodies the very conventions Woolf is
critical of. Overall, the characters which figure into the imagined story are commonplace
and uninteresting the overbearing sister, the unsympathetic children, the critical
outsider/traveler they are one-dimensional representations of hackneyed archetypes,
and no interiority is developed to make interesting their relationship to Minnie Marsh.
The collection of events recalled in the imagined story is itself sensational and overdone.
This is a dramatic landscape that a male writer would have envisioned for a female
protagonist abused and abandoned, seeking aid and shelter from the oppressive world.
Inevitably, the imagined story may be read as a parody of bourgeois conventions just as
how Minnie Marshs crime was cheap (23) of cheap devices employed by the maledominated literary tradition. Consider the role of males within the narrators limited
experience: on the train, each passenger is doing something to hide or stultify his
knowledge (19; emphasis mine). Only the last a female looks at life (19) and is
closest to a mimetic reflection of it. Whereas the last male leaves the scene crumpling

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his paper contemptuously (20), the narrator folds the paper into a perfect square, using
it as a device to gaze into the life of her subject. The narrator is effectively looking into
herself and vice versa, examining the feminine sensibilities of everyday experience.
However, there are differences between this story and Mansfields, differences
which illuminate their distinct approaches towards the role of women rupturing into an
oppressive patriarchal culture. The first difference is how the protagonists project their
character into the textual milieu. The anonymous spinster in Woolfs story mainly
projects her aesthetic principles into the Minnie Marsh sitting across from her. These
principles coincide with Woolfs acquired theories of Bloomsbury formalism, and her
short story literally bends the standards of reality and authorial control. Here, the
presence of ordered reality in this story is bare and confused just as the narrator and her
subject sit together in a train, the story is processed anew as a family history of an
imagined Minnie Marsh. The story bears no claim on authoritative omniscience in fact,
the narrator often intervenes at various moments, usually in the midst of narrative
dilemmas on how to drive the plot forward. The situation for Bertha in Bliss is
radically different; although Mansfields writing style is aesthetically unique; her
construction of diction and language is primarily meant to highlight the ambiguous and
circuitous development of Berthas sexual identity. In this story, Bertha is unaware of her
homoerotic tendencies, but she projects these feelings nevertheless from her
assumptions of Pearl to the very passionate desires that are burgeoning in her chest.
These corporeal projections differ tremendously from the aesthetic projections Woolf
offers; for example, although we find ourselves alone in the private chambers of Clarissa

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Dalloway, we manage to glimpse only her rare moments of spiritual enlightenment or
cerebral revelation there is no window into Clarissas more corporeal sensitivities.
Along with a characters ability to project their values and preoccupations into the
textual milieu, Woolf also emphasizes the necessity of self-analysis and reflection. In her
autobiography A Sketch of the Past, detailing her experiences which have made her a
writer, she recalls anecdotes involving emotional trauma and physical abuse a brutal
fight with her brother; hearing of an acquaintances suicide. As she analyzes these
incidents in her past, Woolf realizes that these violent moments of shock and abuse have
contributed to her capacity to write:
Though I still have the peculiarity that I receive these sudden shocks, they are
now always welcome And so I go on to suppose that the shock-receiving
capacity is what makes me a writer a shock is at once in my case followed by
the desire to explain it it is or will become a revelation of some order and I
make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make
it whole And I see this when I have a shock. (Woolf 72).
Judging from Woolfs attitudes towards patriarchal values, it would not be a stretch to
argue that Woolf considers shock and abuse to be a fundamental inheritance for a
woman, and more especially, a woman writer (Freeman 74). We also witness Woolfs
attempt to put these feelings into words, her desire to explain it (72), when we examine
the projection of aesthetic devices in the character of Minnie Marsh, who is abused by
nearly everyone she encounters. Although these violent experiences are caricatured to the
point of absurdity, we see in Woolfs parody the elements of her critique coming
together, becoming whole the parody of Minnie Marsh is an affirmation of the
females patriarchal plight, and Woolfs words as they begin to form an aesthetic
projection of her formalist principles represent an empowering rupture from the

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dominant literary culture. In this sense, Woolf is deeply reflective about the females
sensitivities in contemporary society.
Yet there is also a moment concerning the vagaries of female sexuality in her
autobiography, in which she describes a sexually traumatic experience of molestation by
her stepbrother. Peculiarly enough, Woolf remains oddly detached. The passage is
subordinated to her main interest on the page, which concerns the reasons behind her
shame and fear of the looking-glass. In referring to the looking-glass, Woolf reveals:
Yet this did not prevent me from feeling ecstasies and raptures spontaneously and
intensely and without any shame or the least sense of guilt, so long as they were
disconnected with my own body. I thus detect another element in the shame
which I had in being caught looking at myself in the glass in the hall. I must have
been ashamed or afraid of my own body. (Woolf 68).
Her detached and subordinated memory of her childhood molestation thus represents
textually the degree to which she has disassociated herself from her body and from her
corporeal sexuality. This guilt and shame in her own self-image is carried over into the
very text of her writing. Whereas she is able to reflect on the patriarchal abuses incurred
by women and is able to project her own aesthetic principles into the textual milieu,
Woolf is unable to properly explain in words her sense of guilt and shame regarding
sexuality and pleasure of the corporeal grain she is disconnected with my own body
(68). Thus we find Minnie Marsh alone in her bedroom, a fully private moment yet the
looking-glass no, you avoid the looking-glass (22). No further reflections are made
into the looking-glass; the issues of corporeal self-image, of corporeal sexuality is
psychically avoided, and never referred to again. Although Bertha herself is unable to
successfully reflect into the mysteries of her bliss, Mansfield is fully aware of where

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she is headed with in writing her complicated love triangle, and the hinted ironies of
Berthas ambiguous passions.
We hence find two writers selectively projecting their specific concerns into the
textual milieu; in addition, each author reflects upon different issues relating to
femininity, with Woolf concerned with the aesthetic influence by the patriarchal culture,
and avoiding entirely the corporeal afflictions that Mansfield eagerly toys with. Each
author represents a unique approach to the rupture into conventional themes of the
time, their short stories becoming the fertile ground for their later works.

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Works Cited
1. Woolf, Virginia. The essays of Virginia Woolf II. Andrew McNeillie, ed. London:
The Hogarth Press, 1987.
2. Woolf, Virginia. Monday or Tuesday: Eight Stories. Paul Negri, ed. New York:
Dover Publications, 1997.
3. Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being. Jeanne Schulkind, ed. London: Harcourt Inc,
1976
4. Mansfield, Katherine. Stories. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.
5. Moran, Patricia. The Flaw in the Centre: Writing as Hymenal Rupture in
Virginia Woolfs Work. Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature. 17:1 (1998): 101121.
6. Neaman, Judith. Allusion, Image, and Associative Pattern: The Answers in
Mansfields Bliss. Twentieth Century Literature. 32:2 (1986): 242-254.
7. Freeman, Barbara. Addiction and Inscription in Virginia Woolfs A Sketch of
the Past. Diacritics. 27:3 (1997): 65-76.