Do all female writers write in this tone? Their short stories, rather. The woman, mostly alone with her thoughts and deeds eventually comes to the realization that every preconceived notion she had about her life is in direct conflict with the truth and everything she held dear is worthless? Okay, so it's probably unfair to assume all women writers do this based on one short story, especially one from the age where women had so few rights.
But the character is so incredibly happy without knowing why, not asking questions about the nanny's possessive nature with her child, or why her life seems so simple. She blindly goes on until she spies her husband with the woman she invited to dinner, then her entire house of cards falls. Is this the point? I believe so, yet isn't there a happy story out there? Perhaps happiness is not dramatic enough. I would settle for a truly evil woman character, one who gets her comeuppance in the end, but these forlorn and naïve women just make me sad.
Why do I pity her? It's obvious that is the way she was brought up, not to question or rock the boat, but I cannot empathize with her plight. It is in the way she looks at the fruit on the table, matching the carpet so well that her heart is filled with absurd joy. I've felt that, the superficial day-to-day activities buoyed up by a simple flower arrangement or a particularly good deal at the shoe store. But the rest of it, especially the lack of maternal rights this woman feels is alien to me. But if I can identify with one aspect of this woman's plight, shouldn't I be able to se it all? Or is the story just outdated? But how does Mansfield evoke this sadness of emotion in me? It has to be the way the woman never questioned her fate, just accepted it and rushed headlong into the worst possible scenario of her life- namely her husband in the arms of another woman. This foundation on which she had built her life is now shattered, irretrievable, and it will force the woman to ask why she had never wondered about her life. Is this what I had been missing? It's not a story about sadness; although that is the first reaction- it is the story about achieving adulthood and independent thought. For this woman will never again go around blindly, accepting the social norms of what has been dictated to her from birth. The point of the story is the imagined next day of this woman, who has been so shaken to her core, and how she will survive the knowledge of hypocrisy in the world. So this poor woman is actually a hero- she has gone through her adolescence a bit later than one would hope of a modern day woman, but nonetheless, she has achieved her own independence. So in reality, it is a story of triumph.
Bertha Young thinks her marriage and life are so wonderful that she is overcome by spasms “of bliss – absolute bliss!”. Her feeling of sheer joy verges on hysteria. When her husband rings to say he will be late home, she tries to share her mood with him:
“…oh, Harry”
“Yes?”
What had she to say? She’d nothing to say. She only wanted to get in touch with him for a moment. “
The desire to share a mood is spoiled when Bertha realizes it is impossible, but also it is spoiled because Harry refused her chance to share by being unsympathetic and impatient. Bertha suspects Harry would not be sympathetic to her flights of fancy, for male and female experience life differently; their roles are separate. Bertha’s role is domestic, but it is leavened by her marvelously inventive mind: she chooses fruit not as objects to eat, but to complement her décor – purple grapes to tone with the new dining-room carpet. Harry’s life is not domestic. He says to dinner guest: ‘My dear Mrs Knight, don”t ask me about my baby. I never see her. I shan’t feel the slightest interest in her until she has a lover’. He is another male philistine, sensitive only to his physical needs and unresponsive to hose of his wife and child.
Bertha says very little at her dinner party, preferring to absorb the beauty of it and so to be receptive to the words and action of her guests; Harry is noisy abd vulgar, ‘doing things at high pressure’, and spoiling moods with gratuitous remarks about livers, flatulence, and women running fat. Earlier that evening, Bertha thought she was very lucky in her marriage: ‘really – really – she had everything. She was young. Harry and she were as much in love as ever, and they got on together splendidly and were really god pals’. During the party Bertha feels sexual desire for the first time: “Oh, she’d loved him […] leading up to?” But when Bertha feels full of happiness is about to be hers and real union achieved, Harry reveals he is Pearl Fulton’s lover; he arranges an assignation for tomorrow in an overtly sensual way ‘Harry’s nostrils … Yes”
Bertha misunderstood everything. Any closeness was an illusion. Isolation in absolute. Bertha asks at the end, ‘Oh, what is going to happen now?”. There is no answer , but probably life will continue for her as before, except she will have the memory of blss to comfort her, as is implied in the last sentence of the story ‘but the pear tree was lovely as ever and as full of flower and as still’. Bertha will not reject Harry because she is not overtly rebellious. She questions Nanny’s tyranny in the nursery but she accepts it :How absurd it was. … but in another woman’s arms?’. Bertha may think civilization is “more than idiotic”, but she will not try to change it. Women schooled for so long to be self-effacing and acquiescent to the male, learn instead to adapt and bury their dissatisfaction in silence.
Mansfield also utilizes pear tree imagery throughout the story as a "symbol of [Bertha's] own life" (944) and her repressed sexuality. Bertha is both physically and emotionally represented by the tree. She is "slender", "tall", and dressed in the same colors as the pear tree. Metaphorically, her sexual arousal is "flowering...and like the flame of a candle....grow[ing] taller and taller" (947). The pear tree imagery also emphasizes Bertha's sexual constraints and boundaries. Just like the pear tree which stands alone caged by a wall within a garden, Bertha's flowering sexuality is restrained by societies norms and rules. Her sexual arousal and energy is "shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle". One critic states:
The tree does not stand for either for Harry's sexuality or for a pure, spiritual relationship with a woman. The flowering pear tree is a composite symbol representing in its tallness Bertha's homosexual aspirations and in its full rich blossoms, her desire to be sexually used (Anderson 400)
Anderson is saying that Bertha desires to be sexually active but is confused with what she feels and is supposed to do. After sharing an intimate moment at the pear tree with Miss Fulton, Bertha describes the moment as "very rarely [occurring] between women...never between men" (947). She feels as if though intimacy can only be shared between women, and longs for a "sign" of reciprocation of feelings. Yet she is confused to what she "meant by that....and what would happen after that" (947) further emphasizing the suppression of deeper unacknowledged desires.
The realization of her husband's affair shatters Bertha's illusion of what her life is. She thought "she had everything" according to what society deems important, so her homosexual desires were labeled "absurd" and unacknowledged. This proves disastrous to Bertha because it blinds her from the truth that she has superficial "trendy" friends, a distanced child and a cheating husband. Like the pear tree that "was as lovely as ever and as full o flower and as still" (949), Bertha ends the story as sexually ready and confused. Instead of exploring her sexuality against the norms of society, Bertha might have chosen something more interesting than "Tomato Soup" and ended up in a life that was not "so dreadfully eternal"
Mansfield also utilizes pear tree imagery throughout the story as a "symbol of [Bertha's] own life" (944) and her repressed sexuality. Bertha is both physically and emotionally represented by the tree. She is "slender", "tall", and dressed in the same colors as the pear tree. Metaphorically, her sexual arousal is "flowering...and like the flame of a candle....grow[ing] taller and taller" (947). The pear tree imagery also emphasizes Bertha's sexual constraints and boundaries. Just like the pear tree which stands alone caged by a wall within a garden, Bertha's flowering sexuality is restrained by societies norms and rules. Her sexual arousal and energy is "shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle". One critic states:
The tree does not stand for either for Harry's sexuality or for a pure, spiritual relationship with a woman. The flowering pear tree is a composite symbol representing in its tallness Bertha's homosexual aspirations and in its full rich blossoms, her desire to be sexually used (Anderson 400)
Anderson is saying that Bertha desires to be sexually active but is confused with what she feels and is supposed to do. After sharing an intimate moment at the pear tree with Miss Fulton, Bertha describes the moment as "very rarely [occurring] between women...never between men" (947). She feels as if though intimacy can only be shared between women, and longs for a "sign" of reciprocation of feelings. Yet she is confused to what she "meant by that....and what would happen after that" (947) further emphasizing the suppression of deeper unacknowledged desires.
The realization of her husband's affair shatters Bertha's illusion of what her life is. She thought "she had everything" according to what society deems important, so her homosexual desires were labeled "absurd" and unacknowledged. This proves disastrous to Bertha because it blinds her from the truth that she has superficial "trendy" friends, a distanced child and a cheating husband. Like the pear tree that "was as lovely as ever and as full o flower and as still" (949), Bertha ends the story as sexually ready and confused. Instead of exploring her sexuality against the norms of society, Bertha might have chosen something more interesting than "Tomato Soup" and ended up in a life that was not "so dreadfully eternal"
Mansfield also utilizes pear tree imagery throughout the story as a "symbol of [Bertha's] own life" (944) and her repressed sexuality. Bertha is both physically and emotionally represented by the tree. She is "slender", "tall", and dressed in the same colors as the pear tree. Metaphorically, her sexual arousal is "flowering...and like the flame of a candle....grow[ing] taller and taller" (947). The pear tree imagery also emphasizes Bertha's sexual constraints and boundaries. Just like the pear tree which stands alone caged by a wall within a garden, Bertha's flowering sexuality is restrained by societies norms and rules. Her sexual arousal and energy is "shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle". One critic states:
The tree does not stand for either for Harry's sexuality or for a pure, spiritual relationship with a woman. The flowering pear tree is a composite symbol representing in its tallness Bertha's homosexual aspirations and in its full rich blossoms, her desire to be sexually used (Anderson 400)
Anderson is saying that Bertha desires to be sexually active but is confused with what she feels and is supposed to do. After sharing an intimate moment at the pear tree with Miss Fulton, Bertha describes the moment as "very rarely [occurring] between women...never between men" (947). She feels as if though intimacy can only be shared between women, and longs for a "sign" of reciprocation of feelings. Yet she is confused to what she "meant by that....and what would happen after that" (947) further emphasizing the suppression of deeper unacknowledged desires.
The realization of her husband's affair shatters Bertha's illusion of what her life is. She thought "she had everything" according to what society deems important, so her homosexual desires were labeled "absurd" and unacknowledged. This proves disastrous to Bertha because it blinds her from the truth that she has superficial "trendy" friends, a distanced child and a cheating husband. Like the pear tree that "was as lovely as ever and as full o flower and as still" (949), Bertha ends the story as sexually ready and confused. Instead of exploring her sexuality against the norms of society, Bertha might have chosen something more interesting than "Tomato Soup" and ended up in a life that was not "so dreadfully eternal"