In the following essay, Anderson explores the psychological aspects of mood and feeling within the conventional love-triangle plot of "Bliss."

In her study of Katherine Mansfield's art, Anne Friis draws special attention to the style, which "hints and suggests rather than asserts. It is indirect, it is elliptic." Mansfield abbreviates crucial thoughts or statements with dots and dashes, and "by the use of those punctuation marks she waives a mass of description and psychology." In her short story "Bliss" this technique is most apparent, perhaps, in a significant passage occurring just after Bertha Young has her first experience of sexual desire for her husband: "But now - ardently! ardently! The word ached in her ardent body! Was this what that feeling of bliss had been leading up to? But then then - ." Only a proper understanding of the psychological meaning of the story's action enables us to...