Figure and Ground in Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss”: A Cognitive Reading
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“Bliss” is a masterpiece of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories. This article aims to illustrate the prominence of figures and thematic ideas in “Bliss” and to explore its internal cognitive principles based on the figure-ground theory of cognitive poetics. In “Bliss”, the prominence of character, image and theme gives rise to the formation and reversal of “figure” and “ground” within the literary text. Through the conflict between different characters such as extramarital affair or triangle love, the focalization of various images like fire, moonlight and pear tree, and the alienation of narrative techniques and language expressions, for example, the third-person and psychological narratives, as well as the visual changes in color words, “Bliss” successfully achieves the prominence of literary figures, expresses the writer’s emotions and creative intentions, and deepens the connotations of the story’s themes. The prominence of “happy” and “unhappy” figures of the protagonist Bertha Young highlights the story’s grounds and themes: after years of happiness in marriage that may have turned into dreamy illusions, women must rely on their own strength to live independently, confidently, and strongly, correctly recognizing their identities in family, finding their positions in society, and living out brilliance and happiness in daily life.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".