"I believe the greatest failing of all is to be frightened" - Katherine Mansfield, 1920
Essay Topic Question 4: Write a critical review of one story from the reader. The review should be written in a style suitable for publication in a literary magazine or journal. Any sources should be cited.
This critical essay about 'Bliss' by Katherine Mansfield is going to explore the complexities and subtleties of the Modernist experimental writing of this short story from a woman's perspective in the twentieth century. There is the main character Bertha Young existing under the phoenix-like skin of the author so enabling the desires of a tubercular woman, wife, mother and lover to be revealed to the reading audience. The other characters portrayed at the dinner party in Bliss are the ideal compliment to the genius of Mansfield's insightful narrative so enlightening the reader with this tree of knowledge burdened with her figs of life so tragic.
he Kakadu National Park is located in an area covering 20,000 square kilometres of some of the most breath-taking scenery in the world. This is a photographer's dream because of the palette of the six seasons in all their magnificent splendour that occur every year against the backdrop of the horizon stretching into infinity. In the fresh-water mangroves, billabongs, open woodlands, floodplains, wetlands, shady paperbark forests, rivers, waterfalls and the ancient sandstone escarpments. The fact there is rock art dating back over 45,000 thousand years is testament to the Australian aboriginals' spiritual connection to the land. Therefore this is one of the oldest cultures that have lived and thrived in this diversity of landscape and habitat into the twenty-first century. The flora and the fauna is not only ancient but in some cases are just specific to this country. Flocks of birds fly in from the northern hemisphere to escape their winter landscape to bask in this comfort zone along with over a third of Australian birds also living in the Bubu Wetlands with a similar purpose of survival. There is also the sense of the bizarre as the Lotus bird appears to walk on water like the divine. In search of food in the Magela floodplains, freshwater mangroves and billabongs adorned with the sacred blue lotus blossoms which not longer exists in Egypt.
"I believe the greatest failing of all is to be frightened" - Katherine Mansfield, 1920
