Working on the Craft: the Volta in Fictions

Surprising twists & turns in a sonnet-like story: Mansfield’s “Bliss”

But the pear tree was as lovely as ever and as full of flower and as still.

~last line of Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss”~

Volta is an Italian word that has been adopted to describe the turn after the first octet of an Italian (or Petrarchan) sonnet and sometimes just preceding the heroic couplet at the end of a Shakespearean (or Elizabethan) sonnet.

In its original language, volta as a noun is time, as in l’ultima volta (last time). As a verb, however, it means ‘to turn’ — voltare: i.e. volta a destra (turn right). [With thanks to

Silvio Castelletti

.]

Photo by Dana Luig on Unsplash

This dramatic literary change is often dramatic only in the persona’s mind. Something seemingly subtle or invisible but at the same time a complete shift in awareness — a paradigm shift in the way one understands a concept, oneself, or another person — this volta is the quiet climax.

The shift at this point may cheat time. There is all time before the shift and all time after. The shift may be likened to a dance, where we turn a corner to a new way of thinking.

It’s not always good. This awareness might weigh us down like the wedding guest in Rime of the Ancient Mariner who takes in the story of the mariner, unbidden, to arrive at some deeper knowledge of mortality and sin¹.

Seamus Heaney’s touching poem “Follower” tells the story of the persona following his dad around the farm until the last stanza depicts the inevitable markings of time:

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away

Incredibly, Matsuo Bashō manages to use a volta within the space of a haiku:

I come weary,
In search of an inn—
Ah! These wisteria flowers!

The kind of literature (and music and film and paintings…) I enjoy contains surprises. I don’t mean some guy jumping out with a mask nor shock for shock’s sake. These can occasionally be intriguing and fun. The surprise, however, needn’t be large and loud. Sometimes the smallest turns or language or color create the most beautiful and captivating cognitive dissonance. Sometimes they help us to see.

You may - or may not - have learned about the volta when you studied sonnets sometime in school. It is one of these very teachable parts of poetry that most students can grasp, delighting them with some deeper knowledge that they can observe but haven’t quite embodied. It is a lightbulb moment that can be seen on the page. Have a look for yourself in William Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much With Us” or Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Oh, think not I am faithful”:

OH, THINK not I am faithful to a vow!
Faithless am I save to love's self alone.
Were you not lovely I would leave you now:
After the feet of beauty fly my own.
Were you not still my hunger's rarest food,
And water ever to my wildest thirst,
I would desert you–think not but I would!–
And seek another as I sought you first.
But you are mobile as the veering air,
And all your charms more changeful than the tide,
Wherefore to be inconstant is no care:
I have but to continue at your side.
So wanton, light and false, my love, are you,
I am most faithless when I most am true.

Classic voltas tend to be marked with conjunctions, especially: but, and, or and yet. Often these words start a sentence in a somewhat rebellious way. A famous Shakespearean volta in the form of heroic couplet comes in Sonnet 60:

And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.

Or occasionally, they have exclamations, like the Bashō poem above, as in the case of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 34, which uses both exclamation and conjunction:

Ah! but those tears are pearl which thy love sheds,
And they are rich and ransom all ill deeds.

So, where’s all this coming from? Some of you know I’ve been teaching Katherine Mansfield’s stories for the first time recently. I started to think about the way she brings a sonnet-like, tightly dropped volta to the short story and how I might try to do that in my writing. I was thinking about structure as well as the pictures we paint with our fictional words. Mansfield even uses the conjunction or exclamation marker in a similar manner, which I’ll explore through the poignant story: “Bliss.”

In class, we started with “Prelude,” a story that mimics Mansfield’s family’s move from Aukland to its outskirts when she was a child. The ambiguous “they” that repeatedly shows up to various distaff family members is a subtle shadow of fear for women of different generations in the household and perhaps an indication of why Mansfield left New Zealand for London.

At first, my students hated it: What is this? Nothing happens. The story is all over the place, and too long for a short story. As we took a closer look, they were intrigued by the shadows, the images, and the experimental style.

Mansfield never wrote a novel but by many account she had planned for “Prelude” to become a novel and chopped it back enough for short story length, although it retained twelve sections, like puzzle pieces. Although linear, they occasionally shift in their limited omniscient perspective that is not so clear and therefore more of free indirect discourse. It was experimental, and fellow Bloomsbury writer Virginia Woolf used it in the novel Mrs. Dalloway not long after. As Nora Sellei writes:

Mansfield's narrative strategy as applied in "Prelude" seems to work: she catches the momentary and simultaneous, personal and subjective, separate and ambivalent realities of the characters - realities which constitute them as human beings. …[S]he successfully adopted an exclusive use of the point-of-view technique, transferring all the experiences to the individual consciousness. She went one step further and achieved in a brief text what Woolf later in Mrs Dalloway achieved for the novel: the shift form one consciousness to another, thus creating an interplay of truths to replace the truth of traditional narration.²

Woolf and Mansfield worked and socialized together. One reason Mansfield is not as well known is because she stuck to the short story form. The other is because she died of tuberculosis at thirty-four. You can read more about their relationship through

Victoria K. Walker

’s exploration on her

Beyond Bloomsbury

publication: Katherine & Virginia: Friends or Foes? (She also recently republished one of Manfield’s short stories for readers.)

Perhaps the volta in “Prelude” is when a duck’s head gets cut off (for the purpose of dinner) and Kezia, our most-of-the-time protagonist (with momentary shifts to other female characters who not only give us different perspectives but completely fresh conflicts as well), is shocked with this version of reality that includes death. Her understanding of the world is incongruous to what she has just witnessed:

But Kezia suddenly rushed at Pat and flung her arms round his legs and butted her head as hard as she could against his knees.

"Put head back! Put head back!" she screamed.

It comes much earlier than the last line and there is even time for the adult characters to clean it up and cook it so that it appeared as if it never had a head: “It lay, in beautifully basted resignation, on a blue dish…”. This Picasso-like dismembering mirrors the concept of absurdity the modernist writers explore so well.

On the day that Mansfield’s “Bliss” was due in class, the students chimed: “I loved that story, oh my God, it was so beautiful,” and then, “Wait, does he have an affair at the end?”

In fact, they just loved the prose, the immersion in color, like looking at a painting by Van Gogh, of whom Mansfield was a fan. They weren’t sure what to make of the characters and their relationships or feelings at the end.

Thirty-year-old Bertha Young is returning home in a state of blissful happiness as the story starts:

What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly by a feeling of bliss–absolute bliss!–as though you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe? . . .

She goes on to choose colorful fruits from the garden to make an aesthetically pleasing display inside her home. Then, she spends time with her baby, although she has to argue with the nanny to be allowed to do so. The nanny feels it is her job, her responsibility to feed and bathe the child, but Bertha wants to have that connection, wondering in the third-person stream of consciousness why anyone would have a baby not to take care of it: “How absurd it was. Why have a baby if it has to be kept–not in a case like a rare, rare fiddle–but in another woman's arms?”

The baby, the colorful fruit and domestic aesthetics…these are both sources of her bliss as is the anticipation of dinner guests. In her preparation and moving around the house, she frequently proclaims her state of happiness and eventually likens herself symbolically to her own pear tree:

And she seemed to see on her eyelids the lovely pear tree with its wide open blossoms as a symbol of her own life.

This statement, marked with the “And” to start the sentence, might be the first mini-volta in the story. The realization that she is as strong and beautiful as this tree, that her desires are natural, is a comfort. The free indirect discourse both allows us to witness Bertha and understand her, creating movement between her inner self and the aesthetics of the world around her.

As evening arrives, Bertha spends time showing the enigmatic and beautiful Pearl Fulton around the house with whom she feels an intimate connection that is either sexual desire or a feeling that they each have the same outlook on life that is asynchronous with other women. It is no accident that “Pearl” contains “pear” in her name.

However, following dinner and just before Pearl’s departure, Bertha witnesses an exchange between her husband and Pearl that suggests they are having an affair. Seeking solace or some kind of answer, Bertha runs to the window to view the pear tree, now a symbol of herself, asking it in apostrophe: “‘Oh! What is going to happen now?’”

The only line that follows is the one at the top of this page, the volta-ending:

One can read this as mixed metaphor, including allusions to the Garden of Eden and a deeper look at Bertha’s sexuality. A good modern story is by definition rather ambiguous, allowing multiple perspectives to exist at once. Mansfield was a pro at this as were, for example, Joyce and Woolf.

To me, the symbolic and calm ending means that while we may not know the details of the way this affair will play out for Bertha and her marriage, she can continue to feel ‘bliss’ and to stand unruffled by the actions of those around her. Throughout the story, she has proven she can be her own person despite class or gender expectations. It seems to have the ultimate inner truth that others cannot change us or ruin our happiness.

An inner conflict, seemingly subtle, is the focus of the story. It’s not something as large as who am I, no, an internal reckoning or awakening might be about the concept that one is (already) free.

The volta is so satisfying because it is a kind of dance on the page and in the mind.

---

How do you read the ending of “Bliss”?

Do you use voltas in your fiction or have other good examples?

How might you use this concept in the future, as reader or writer?

My apologies for missing the last couple of weeks on here. I’ve been a bit inundated. Still writing lots of fiction but there are many nascent projects rather than stories I can bring you at this time. Thank you for reading and for your thoughts!

1. Coleridge’s Rime, as read by Ian McKellan:

2. Séllei, Nóra. “‘THE DETACHED EXISTENCE OF A WORK OF ART:’ MANSFIELD’S ‘THE ALOE’ VERSUS ‘PRELUDE’ AND WOOLF’S THEORY OF FICTION.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS), vol. 1, no. 2, 1995, pp. 75–84. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41273898. Accessed 12 Feb. 2025.