One of the hallmarks of Katherine Mansfield's work is its uneasy relationship to knowledge. Her characters stumble about, trying to narrate what they know, or hope to know, even as they just as regularly misunderstand not only their desire, but also the desire of others. In a letter of 1918 to John Middleton Murry, Mansfield describes what she refers to as ‘two “kick offs” in the writing game’, in which writing, as a form of knowledge, reveals itself to her. The first is marked, coincidentally enough, by a kind of peaceful bliss in which ‘something delicate and lovely seems to open before my eyes, like a flower without thought of a frost or a cold breath’; the second is much more sinister, born of ‘an extremely deep sense of hopelessness – of everything doomed to disaster, almost willfully, stupidly’. A crucial dimension of the difference between these forms of knowing, of writing, is less Mansfield's attitude than the shape the writing takes. She insists that the former is conditioned by humility, to express what she witnesses during the act of writing, whilst the latter is ‘a cry against corruption that is absolutely the nail on the head’. When one considers these two forms of knowledge, the first is a revelation that must be approached cautiously, humbly, for fear that the act of writing itself might inadvertently misconstrue or mar the beauty of its truth; the second takes a violent stand against that which threatens to corrupt knowledge or truth itself. Although each form of knowledge is shaped by a desire to know, one is structured by submission and the other by resistance. Fittingly, both submission and resistance inform the strange knowledge, the strange desires, that the character Bertha encounters in Mansfield's short story, ‘Bliss’.

For Jacques Lacan, desire searches for objects to fill, however provisionally, the fundamental lack that constitutes desire; we should recall that desire is meant to be sustained, that it cannot be ultimately or completely fulfilled because every object of desire is a substitute for the lost Thing, the primordial object which castration denies to us.