In the following essay, Zorn argues that cultural bias is responsible for the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of "Bliss" by critics.
It is perhaps inevitable, given our cultural bias, that Bertha Young, who yearned to share her feelings of "bliss" with her husband and friends and failed to find the language that would communicate it, has been misunderstood and misrepresented by the critics of this most popular of Katherine Mansfield's stories. Even a largely sympathetic critic like Sylvia Berkman has had difficulty with Bertha, seeing her as representative of the brittle set among which she moves, an example of a "modern metropolitan woman" who is "callous, temperamental, selfish and unreasonable," demanding "servile, undeviating attention" from her men. Miss Berkman is uneasy with this mold for Bertha, for she goes on to admit: "Bertha Young in 'Bliss' to.....
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