Writing Toward a New World: Awakenings in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ and Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April

Noreen O’Connor argues that Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’ and her cousin Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April each present a specifically female narrative of awakening to consciousness of the alienated nature of bourgeois marriage; however, the texts also open up the possibility for women to reinvent and restructure their lives. The essay compares each text’s narration style, discussing the ways in which Mansfield’s third-person limited narration reveals the main character Bertha’s struggle to bring a new desire into language, even as it captures the great difficulties that acting on such an awakening presents in the modernist era. Von Arnim’s use of free indirect discourse narration echoes that of Mansfield’s, revealing the flawed bourgeois social conventions that constrain women from acting upon their desires. However, the narrative also emphasises the shared nature of the multiple women characters’ experiences, and quickly pushes past the isolated alienation that Mansfield’s story addresses. The Enchanted April, further, in the shape of a double quest narrative, moves beyond the scene of awakening to offer a vision for women of individual self-determination as well as strategies for imagining and building a supportive, peaceful, post-World War One community based upon mutual understanding, respect, and pacifist ideals of universal love.