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Bliss Stories

In this collection of global scenes (NZ, London, Paris, Munich), KM takes leaps and bounds past the earlier thematic constriction of In a German Pension and begins to explore past pure satire and into sympathy with unsympathetic characters

Themes and Motifs

• Childhood (“Prelude,” “Sun and Moon”, “The Wind Blows”)
  • “Sun and Moon” children’s view only
  • “Prelude” gives both
  • “Wind Blows” shows early adolescence through early adulthood’s eyes
• Sexuality and Innocence (“The Little Governess,” “Sun and Moon,” “Mr. Reginald Peacock’s Day,” “The Wind Blows,” “Bliss,” “Je ne parle pas”)
  • Biblical imagery of Genesis, Eve eating the apple (nut-handle of “Sun and Moon,” strawberries of “The Little Governess”)
    • Compare to “Psychology” and its use of food as the gateway drug to sex
  • Innocence lost (“Governess,” “Sun and Moon,” “Bliss,” “Je ne parle pas”)
    • “Je ne parle” is from the opposite point of view: not from the victim’s side, but from the villain’s
  • Isolated world, no real problems result (“Mr. Peacock,” “Wind”)
    • Music lessons seem to allow it to happen
• Music Lessons (“Mr. Reginald Peacock’s Day,” “The Wind Blows”)
  • Chance for concupiscence
• Foreigner tricks English lady (“The Little Governess,” “Je ne parle pas”)
  • Echo of H James
• Foreign Travel (“A Dill Pickle,” “The Little Governess”)
• War (“Pictures,” “A Dill Pickle”)
  • Excuse for bad behavior at homefront
• Young Relationships (“A Dill Pickle,” “Psychology,” “Feuille d’Album”)
• Bloomsbury/literary bohemia (“Psychology,” “Bliss, “Je ne parle,” “Feuille d’Album”)
  • Emphasizes superficiality and shallowness
• Sick wife (“The Man without a Temperament,” “The Escape”)
  • Emphasize boredom of long-suffering husbands
  • “Escape” castigates woman, while “Temperament” is kind to both spouses
• Cafe, tea room, restaurant (“Je ne parle pas,” “Pictures,” “A Dill Pickle”)
  • As refuges
  • As low refuge (“Pictures”)
  • Place for happenstance meetings (“Pickle”)
• Social Mobility (“Je ne parle,” “Pictures,” “Mr. Reginald,” “A Dill Pickle,” “The Little Governess”)
  • Usually downward: how quickly and quietly it happens
  • Upward movement of Mr. Peacock offset by downward of Miss Ada Moss
  • Two by seduction (“Governess,” “Pictures”)
  • “A Dill Pickle” shows one upward, one downward
• Party (“Sun and Moon,” “Bliss, “Je ne parle”)
  • Both show sexual knowledge growing as a result
  • “Sun and Moon” seems like the young child version of adolescents’ “The Garden Party”
  • Raoul uses it as meat market
• Food (“Psychology,” “Sun and Moon,” “Bliss”)
  • As a site for cathexis
  • Symbol or stand-in for sexuality or adulthood via sensuality
    • Food is the gateway drug to sex
• Psychological Theory (psychoanalysis in “Psychology,” “mind system” in “A Dill Pickle”)
  • As conversation, it helps people avoid messy romantic entanglements
  • Psychology helps people elude necessary confrontations: it is used as an evasion
• Middle class relation to lower class (“The Little Governess,” “Revelations,” “Sun and Moon,” “Prelude”)
  • Children are positive and friendly to them, but adults are scared of them and still dependent on them (like a postcolonial-psychoanalytic reading Marxist relations of production)
• Neurasthenic Wife “Prelude,” “Temperament,” “Revelations,” “The Escape”)
  • Positive/Neutral: “Prelude,” “Temperament”
  • Negative: “Revelations,” “The Escape”
• Natural Beauty (“Prelude,” “Bliss,” “The Escape”)
  • “Prelude:” natural beauty reflects the feminine flowering that KM really wants to sketch
  • “Bliss” and “The Escape” feature a central tree that fascinates the two spouses taking a break from their typical marital relations

“Prelude”

• In a revolving panorama of mostly female family minds, KM analyzes the differences and similarities of the family network
• The Burnells: proud bourgeois Stanley, anti-maternal dreamy Linda, proud leader Isabel, girlish scared Lottie, and creative sensitive Kezia
• The Fairfields: vain part-playing husband-hunting Beryl (aunt) and useful Grandmother
• Pat, helpful trustworthy handyman who kills the ducks
• Mrs. Samuel Josephs and children (they tease the girls), cousins Pip and Rags Trout (rough and ready, lower class than Burnells)
• Move to the country: parallels 1893 move to Karori
• Bourgeois, Business, Childhood, Death, Garden, Imagination, Innocence, Marriage, Motherhood
• Form, Transitions, Figurative language
• The parrots and the pansies on the wallpaper that “come alive” for Kezia and Linda respectively; the “last packet” of emotion to give to Stanley is hatred;

“Je ne parle pas francais”

• In an extended exercise in voice and revenge, Pansexual, over-petted, simpering Raoul Duquette leaves poor Englishgirl, Mouse, in the dust after his friend, Dick, leaves her out of fear for his mother
• Art: Mildly successful artist; portrait of fashionable art society; sentimentality and sincerity vie for attention
  • Good Soldier like rant about looking versus being (”Isn’t looking – being? And being – looking? At any rate who is to say that it is not?”)
• Regret (it makes a good story but a bad psychology)
• Cafe (lets him wallow, provides a stage for his rants)
• Childhood and adulthood sexuality (his laundress; does he want Dick or Mouse?)
• Voice/Tone, Self-reflexivity

“Bliss”

• In a glib satire against innocent wives and silly Bohemia, Bertha Young, full of bliss, at a party where her lust for her new “find” Pearl Fulton leads to lust for her husband, finds out the latter are having an affair
• Sexuality, Innocence, Bohemia, Parties, Middle-class patronage, Aestheticism versus Rationalism, Marriage
• Their clothes are all so color-coded! It’s silly (banana-monkey Mrs. Norman Knight, silver-green Bertha, silver Pearl, white-socked Eddie)
• Symbolism, Indirect Discourse, inspiration for Sally and Clarissa in Mrs. Dalloway
• ”Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?”
• ”I saw myself _driving through Eternity in a timeless taxi!”_ (pale poet Eddie Warren)

“The Wind Blows”

• In a light sketch of bourgeois life, a slightly older Matilda remembers a windy day (a lustful music lesson, attractive to all students Mr. Bullen, and a fun walk with her brother, Bogey), as she leaves her native land forever
• Memory, Bourgeois Sexuality, Bourgeois Life Adolescence, Family struggle
• Doppelganger/Mirroring
• ”Revolting, simply revolting!” as her mother speaks to the butcher on telephone

“Psychology”

• In a minute psychological analysis of two bungling would-be lovers against a physical, sensuous backdrop of conducive domesticity, an unnamed trio (KM, LM, and JMM?) acts out scenes of hesitant love.
• Violets given by LM convince KM to try JMM once again
• Whipped cream, cakes, sandwiches, with the porcelain boy on the mantlepiece and the drama of moving the tea-table around
• Henry James like determination and specificity in recording of the minute-by-minute emotions of a person
• ”Positively upholstered minds”
• ”the kind of cake that might have been mentioned in the Book of Genesis. ‘And God said “Let there be cake.” And so it was.’”

“Pictures”

• In this heartbreaking record of wartime life for civilians, we follow contralto Miss Ada Moss, down on her luck, on the day when the poverty-stricken woman finally succumbs to the inevitable.
• Importance of good meals (Good Hot Dinners, with a bottle of Nourishing Stout, and Sensible Substantial Breakfasts)
• Wartime civilian suffering
• Working in the movies
• Earlier, retreats to an ABC Tearoom (too commercialized to be comforting) and later, retreats to a risque cafe (shows the range of leisure spaces)
  • ”Can you aviate – high-dive – drive a car – buckjump – shoot?” from a film studio’s questionnaire
  • ”I’ll come with you, if it’s all the same,” is the unremarkable, dull way she characterizes her destruction
• Dream-sequences, alternation of sections with lots of emotional description to others with absolutely none of it

“The Man without a Temperament”

• In this delicate study on the effects of devoting oneself to one’s spouse, our roving narrator follows faithful Robert Salesby on a typical day of waiting on his consumptive wife, the fragile cheerful guilt-ridden Jinnie, filled with kind attentions and wishful flashbacks.
• KM meditates on what would have happened if JMM had indeed taken care of her in the South of France; she not only creates an exquisite, touching characterization of undying support, but also she manages to let JMM off the hook by showing how much Robert sacrificed for Jinnie. Here, she balances forgiveness and wishful-thinking.
• Jealousy, Patience, Sickness, Service, Delicacy
• Sacrifice: ”You’re bread and wine, Robert. Bread and wine.” Jinnie comparing him to Jesus through the imagery of Catholic mass
• Flashbacks
• Nicknames (The Two Topknots, The American Woman, The Honeymoon Couple)
• Associations (flashbacks are triggered by some kind of association, such as snow or a pastoral scene of farmers grape-harvesting)
• Lingering Focalization: narrator follows a scene just a moment after the focalized character leaves the room, before following the accustomed POV (Robert)
• ”Was he a juicy one?” Jinnie trying to make light of her asking him to do her the favor of killing the mosquito under her bed-netting

“Mr. Reginald Peacock’s Day”

• In this shameless castigation of the bourgeois husband, the morbidly “sensitive,” Eddie-Warren-like, self-absorbed singing teacher Reginald Peacock bullies his poor wife as he half-seduces his many students and socially superior, wealthy patrons
• Ego, Paranoia, the “Art” excuse
• Not remarkable for its form or style
• ”Dear lady, I should only be too charmed,” the reply he uses for every single woman in his life, which in the end blocks out his ability to have any sincere, unique love or affectionate displays left for his wife.

“Sun and Moon”

• In a prophetic loss of innocence story veiled in the magical atmosphere of childish ignorance, easily shocked brother Sun and debutante-in-training sister Moon waver on the periphery of an adults-only party, not intellectually understanding but emotionally grasping the sexuality, sordidness, and sensuality of adult life.
• Climax: Sun sees the “ice pudding” mansion (with its nut handle) melting and half-eaten – a symbol of adult degradation – and bursts into screams as Moon casually takes and eats the sacred nut. (Adam and Eve scene, eating the apple slash nut.)
• Narrator uses coy, evasive language to recreate the innocence of children (for example, the piano tuner is just a bad concert pianist to the children)
• Family, Sexuality, and Food
• ”’Have a bit of this ice,” said Father, smashing in some more of the roof…. ‘The little handle’s left. The little nut. Kin I have it?’” asks Moon before she cruelly takes the nut away—Sun’s last hope.

“Feuille d’Album”

• In an unremarkable vignette about love in the bohemian Parisian art-world, the romantically elusive painter Ian French surveils his dark, thin neighbor.
• Single life of the middle class (an easy self-sufficiency without servants)
• Egg symbolism
• ”Why come to Paris if you want to be a daisy in a field?” smart Parisian women say about him.

“A Dill Pickle”

• In a brilliant miniaturization of the rise and fall of an entire relationship, a reunion scene between two unnamed people in a public restaurant or coffee house both reawakens affection and hope and then destroys them, showing that despite the changes their lives have had, they still don’t really sympathize with each other.
• Differing memories: he remembers the good, she the bad (he: beautiful afternoon at Kew Gardens, she: him making a scene at the Chinese Tea House; he: a lovely Christmas night, where he brings her a tree; she: the night where he ridiculed her for wasting money on caviar)
• Mutability of personality: he believes they have changed, but she knows (and his actions show) that they’re both just the same old thing
• “Mind system” of Russia (new psychological systems)
• Social mobility (downward and upwards)
• Impossibility of romantic relationship ending in total satisfaction (ie, marriage isn’t the solution for all your problems)
• ”No, really, that is eating money,” he says about the caviar.

“The Little Governess”

• In this modern recreation of Eve, the snake, and the apple in Eden, we have the Little Governess, the “old man,” and the strawberries in a tourists’ Munich. An inexperienced girl traveling to a family in Augsburg is seduced by a man whom she thinks looks like a grandfather through her susceptibility to “seeing the sights.” Her stinginess in tipping, combined with this foolishness, causes her to lose her place.
• Vulnerability of women in travel (“Dames Seules” compartment violated)
• The class of women likely to be tricked (these types of women are vulnerable, she points out)
• Food: strawberries lead to ice cream, beer, sausages, lunch… but even though she resists the wine, she still falls victim.
• Terror
• Motif or symbol of translation/foreign language
• Relation of middle class to servant class
• Foreign travel
• Beer ”which he told her wasn’t intoxicating, wasn’t at all like English beer”

“Revelations”

• In a short, not too terribly well-written vignette, KM castigates the genteel misery of the kept wife against the real miseries of the working class. Stuck in her own world, apparently driven out of her mind by the wind and by a few telephone calls, she drifts around self-absorbed as the hairdresser attending her (the comfort she habitually relies upon) works even though his first child has just died hours ago
• Protofeminism (saying that she no longer wants to play roles for her husband’s delight) and protosocialism (sympathy with the lower class) sink under the weight of narcissistic self-pity
• Sick/neurasthenic wife (unsympathetic here)
• The bourgeois wife’s complete immersion in a system of modern comforts and technologies (taxis, hairdressers, telephones, restaurants, servants)
• Relations to lower class (dependence upon Marie, her lady’s maid, and upon her hairdressers)

“The Escape”

• In a retelling of “The Man without a Temperament,” KM reveals the way the neurasthenic wife drives her husband into a fantasy world, while leaving him and the servant class ways to torment her passively-aggressively
• Cigarette smoke, loss of parasol done purposefully?
• Her objects in her purse’s “shiny, silvery jaws,” including cigarette, pills, powder-puff, mirror: //”’In Egypt she would be buried with those things,’” he thinks.
• Beautiful tree of “Bliss” comes up again
• Foreign travel
• Sick wife (neurasthenic wife) (unsympathetic here)

Theses

• Food as the gateway drug to sex
• Family sexuality a la Freud
• Music lessons as the bourgeois girl’s entry into sexuality
• Psychology doesn’t actually help you confront your problems, but is actually and paradoxically an easy way to avoid confronting sexuality and romance up-front