Katherine Mansfield - "The Doll's House" & "Pictures" & "Bliss"

OK - I just finished Katherine Mansfield's "The Doll's House" (1921) and I liked it and it is definitely going on my list.  It's an incredibly interesting little story about three little girls who get a doll's house from a woman who has stayed with their family for a while.  The little girls manage to invite all of the other little girls to their house to see the doll's house, except for the Kelvey girls, who are outcasts in this little community because their mother is a washerwoman and their father is believed to be in jail.  There is an incredible emphasis on the gaze and looking and seeing and watching, but it is also intertwined with silence, too, specifically the silence of the Kelvey girls as they listen (aural surveillance) to everything that's said around them but don't talk to the girls because the girls have been forbidden by their families to talk to Lil and Else Kelvey.  

And also just finished "Pictures" (1919) which is about Miss Ada Moss who is a contralto singer who can't find work, so she tries to get a casting call as an actress instead, but that also doesn't pan out.  If she can't find work before 8pm the following night, her landlady is going to kick her out because she can't pay the rent.  So finally after finding no job she ends up at Cafe de Madrid, where she sits down at a table and ends up having a drink with a man who joins her.  It's left unsaid at the end of the story whether, when she goes off with the man, if she is going with the intent to sell herself or if she thinks he's actually capable of helping her find a job.  Can't say that these endings to Mansfield's stories are very good.

Lastly, I've finished "Bliss" (1918) which is also a strange little story.  It's about Bertha who has a little daughter that she adores and apparently a husband that she adores as well, but who she's never really desired sexually.  The 'bliss' that she's feeling is posed as being a sexual awakening, and she thinks that for the first time she actually wants her husband, but of course there's this other character-Miss Fulton--who complicates this sexual awakening and makes the reader wonder if this is really a desire for her husband or a desire for Miss Fulton.  The twist comes at the end (spoiler alert!) when Bertha overhears Miss Fulton and her husband making plans for a rendezvous, which is perhaps surprising because the entire evening (there's been a dinner party at Bertha's house), her husband has seemed to dislike Miss Fulton, which we now know at the end of the story to be a facade.  So Bertha's sexual awakening is thwarted. This story is interesting to me, but I'm not sure if I'll keep it on my list.  

Definitely of the three stories I've read tonight, "The Doll's House" is my favorite.