A Study of the Conscious and Unconscious Perception of the Status of Happiness in Katherine Mansfield's Short Story Bliss
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Kathleen Mansfield is one of the outstanding twentieth century short story writers. Her short story Bliss (1922) describes a day in the heroine, Bertha Young’s life who is preparing for a grand dinner party to be held in the evening in her own house. She intends to reveal to all her guests her utter exultation and contentment with husband Harold. She imagines that she has everything she hopes for in her marriage to him. Eventually, the experiences of the party climax into a disastrous realization both of her husband’s deception of her and her own naive and unconscious perception of the true meaning of the status of the bliss in her life with him. She also discovers that complete happiness or rapture is either non–existent or superficially achieved within the social reality of male domination and female role playing. As a modern writer, Katherine Mansfield adopts different means, such as magic realism, symbolism, psychoanalysis, Marxism and feminist theories in delineating her female protagonist’s real dilemma. This paper attempts to examine the different techniques that are used by Mansfield in dealing with her central character’s dilemma. The paper also aims to shed light on the female predicament in the late Victorian era and to promote a clear understanding of the true meaning of happiness in human life. The nature of the heroine’s moral, personal and social crisis and her progression to a state of maturity will be thoroughly investigated in the paper. Key words: Conscious; Perception; Self–Delusion; Magic realism; Romanticism; Repulsive self deception and contradictions; Feminism
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".