Essay Plan: Gender in Katherine Mansfield's 'Bliss'

This essay plan was created by a second-year English Literature undergraduate at Durham University.

It looks at the question: ‘Whether an author self-identifies as male or female is what determines the author’s sex. The ways in which the author adopts styles, gestures, conventions, diction, and genres associated in a given culture with male writers or female writers add up to the masculinity or the femininity, the gender of the writing’ (Robyn Warhol). Assess the validity of this distinction with reference to ONE OR MORE literary works of your choice.

This analyses Mansfield’s place within the Bloomsbury Group, Helene Cixous’ theory of ecriture feminine, feminism, and the Modernist era, and her short story, ‘Bliss’.