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This time please write about The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield The structure is exactly the same as the last time i uploaded it Please check on essay 2 about Marxism and file an essay about marxism 2 that I used to upload. So this essay please do not use another source she only accepted that the source in file i give you Please do not use another source outside Thanks dear For this 5-7-page essay, you need to choose one of the short stories below to determine to what degree the main character(s) is/are driven by an economic motive. As we have learned, Marxist theory claims that “getting and keeping economic power is the motive behind all social and political activities, including education, philosophy, religion, government, the arts, science, technology, the media, and so on” (Tyson 50). For this paper, you will need to research and examine the economic setting in the story. Identify the time and place of the story. What was happening economically in that region at that time, and do the characters in the story seem to reflect these economic conditions? This is the question I would like you to answer, as it is the central idea upon which Marxist literary criticism rests. You must research the economic setting of the story you choose, and you need to cite your sources. Do explain in your essay how the economic struggles relate to the theme you identify in the story. Also, do identify any ironies (verbal, situational, cosmic, or dramatic) that you see as important. Be sure to define the ironies you identify and explain how your example fits the definition. You need 5-7 sources for this paper. The critical theory text for the class counts as one source, as does the original short story or play you are examining. Papers with less sources and/or pages will not be accepted and will be returned to you ungraded. You need to use and cite every source listed on your works cited page. This essay needs to be typed, double-spaced, and follow all correct MLA formats. Reputable academic sources are required for this assignment. The GWC library’s databases are highly recommended. You may use both literary resources and historical sources to help you with this assignment, as long as you cite all sources in your paper and list them correctly on your works cited page. The library also provides a MLA handout that shows you how to cite library research correctly. The work cited page is required and is considered a page of your essay, so it counts as one page and should have a page number on it. Thus, your paper will identify the theme of the story, the economic situation and economic struggles of the characters, and any pertinent ironies. In your conclusion, do weigh in on whether you agree or disagree with Marx’s theory that ALL human activity is motivated by getting or keeping economic power, and do be sure to support your opinion. Choose one story in this case to write an essay “Paul’s Case” by Willa Cather “The Garden-Party” by Katherine ...

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This time please write about The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield The structure is exactly the same as the last time i uploaded it Please check on essay 2 about Marxism and file an essay about marxism 2 that I used to upload. So this essay please do not use another source she only accepted that the source in file i give you Please do not use another source outside Thanks dear For this 5-7-page essay, you need to choose one of the short stories below to determine to what degree the main character(s) is/are driven by an economic motive. As we have learned, Marxist theory claims that “getting and keeping economic power is the motive behind all social and political activities, including education, philosophy, religion, government, the arts, science, technology, the media, and so on” (Tyson 50). For this paper, you will need to research and examine the economic setting in the story. Identify the time and place of the story. What was happening economically in that region at that time, and do the characters in the story seem to reflect these economic conditions?
This is the question I would like you to answer, as it is the central idea upon which Marxist literary criticism rests. You must research the economic setting of the story you choose, and you need to cite your sources. Do explain in your essay how the economic struggles relate to the theme you identify in the story. Also, do identify any ironies (verbal, situational, cosmic, or dramatic) that you see as important. Be sure to define the ironies you identify and explain how your example fits the definition. You need 5-7 sources for this paper. The critical theory text for the class counts as one source, as does the original short story or play you are examining. Papers with less sources and/or pages will not be accepted and will be returned to you ungraded. You need to use and cite every source listed on your works cited page. This essay needs to be typed, double-spaced, and follow all correct MLA formats. Reputable academic sources are required for this assignment. The GWC library’s databases are highly recommended. You may use both literary resources and historical sources to help you with this assignment, as long as you cite all sources in your paper and list them correctly on your works cited page. The library also provides a MLA handout that shows you how to cite library research correctly. The work cited page is required and is considered a page of your essay, so it counts as one page and should have a page number on it.
Thus, your paper will identify the theme of the story, the economic situation and economic struggles of the characters, and any pertinent ironies. In your conclusion, do weigh in on whether you agree or disagree with Marx’s theory that ALL human activity is motivated by getting or keeping economic power, and do be sure to support your opinion. Choose one story in this case to write an essay “Paul’s Case” by Willa Cather “The Garden-Party” by Katherine Mansfield “The Rules of the Game” by Amy Tan “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker More detail about an essay: For this 5—7 page essay, you need to choose one of the works listed below to examine how the characters’ behavior may be explained in terms of struggling “to get and keep economic power” (Tyson 50). Because the character’s/characters’ setting is a vital part of the story and chosen deliberately by the author to support the story’s main idea, the characters’ financial struggles are crucial to the story’s theme. You also need to consider which ironies are present in the story. Explore this connection in your paper by identifying what you see as a major theme in the story and how the economic struggles of the character/ characters and
ironies contribute to and/or support the story’s theme. Source List: You need 5-7 sources for this paper. The short story needs to be cited, and it counts as one source. The critical theory book—if cited—counts as another source. Short story list: Paul’s Case” by Willa Cather The Garden-Party” by Katherine Mansfield “The Rules of the Game” by Amy Tan “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker Sample Approaches and Theses: Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case” demonstrates the seductive and cruel siren song of capitalism when Paul steals and then commits suicide to achieve his version of the American Dream. Both the setting in the hardscrabble world of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, and the ironies in the story contribute to proving the truth behind the Marxist maxim that “getting and keeping economic power is the motive behind all social and political activities” (Tyson 50). Katherine Mansfield illustrates how classism is passed on in upper class families in her 1922 short story “The Garden-Party,” revealing the truth behind the Marxist idea that seemingly innocent social events involve socio-economic struggles. While Mama and Maggie in Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use”
refute the Marxist idea that all human activity is motivated by economics and power by continuing their country lifestyle, Dee proves the Marxist maxim true in her educational and social activities. In Amy Tan’s short story “The Rules of the Game,” both Waverly and her mother show how a children’s game of chess was transformed into a way to gain economic power in a Chinese immigrant’s family and society in 1950’s America. Ironically, Waverly becomes a pawn in her mother’s gambit to become the Queen of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Research: Be sure to research the setting, as that will help inform the societal expectations and economic influences of the time and socioeconomic class system in the short story you choose. Setting includes the time and place of the short story, the social classes, gender roles, historical events, manmade objects, and scenes of nature. For example, you may want to look into the following: “Everyday Use”: the Black-Is-Beautiful and Black Power Movements in the U.S. in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the cultural meaning of hair and African dress within the time period for black Americans. You will want to research how being authentically “African” rather than “American” meant higher status within the black community at that time. “Paul’s Case”: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the late 1800’s and early 1900s, the time of “the iron
kings”; Andrew Carnegie, Charles M. Schwab, and the like; NYC in the early 20th century; the Waldorf hotel where Paul stayed, Tiffany’s, Carnegie Hall, the spending power of the money he stole, the meaning behind the flowers he wore and their price, etc. “The Garden-Party”: New Zealand in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the class system in New Zealand, symbolism of gardens in English culture and New Zealand culture, the gender roles present in the story (who is working in the home and outside the home?), significance of the young husband/father’s death, the cost of the flowers, foods, hat, and band in the story. “Rules of the Game”: Chinese immigrant experience in the 1950’s, symbolism of chess, wind directions, fish and turtles in the Chinese markets, Tiger Moms in Asian cultures, racism and sexism in Chinese and 1950s American cultures, and the popularity of chess in 1950s America. Where to Begin Your Research: Literature Resource Center library data base online. Short Stories for Students –reference guide in the GWC LRC’s library both online in Literature Resource Center and hard copy text. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide by Lois Tyson (our theory book online) Research on the economy of the time period. Organization:
Research the setting and figure out how it supports the theme you chose for the story. Remember, stories may have various themes. As you are looking at this story from a Marxist view, you will want to focus on the socioeconomic classes in the setting. Are the poor and upper classes clashing? Is it the middle class against the upper class, or are class conflicts occurring within one class? How are the boundaries between the classes maintained? Who has the economic power? Is the person/class fighting to keep the economic upper hand in some situation? What social, educational, work, art, and/or political activities are occurring in the story, and how do they support/not support getting and keeping economic power? Tie these questions to the behavior, thoughts, words, and views of the character or characters you examine. Find examples in the text of the short story and quote or paraphrase these examples to support your assertions. Be sure to introduce all quotations one of three ways, and do cite for all quotations and paraphrases. Be sure to tie your analysis to the theme of the story in every single. To include the ironies, you may want to include relevant ironies in each paragraph, as well, or you may wish to have a separate paragraph or two to discuss the pertinent ironies you discovered in the story. Be sure to define each of the ironies you use. You should cite the class handout or any other source you use for the definitions.
So for just keep the old essay that you give me and fix it little bit She wants you to make a clear thesis about Identifying the time and place of the story. What was happening economically in that region at that time, and do the characters in the story seem to reflect these economic conditions? This is the question I would like you to answer, as it is the central idea upon which Marxist literary criticism rests and she wants you to complete the essay with introduction, body paragraph and conclusion. For about You must research the economic setting of the story you choose, and you need to cite your sources. Do explain in your essay how the economic struggles relate to the theme you identify in the story. Also, do identify any ironies (verbal, situational, cosmic, or dramatic) that you see as important. Be sure to define the ironies you identify and explain how your example fits the definition. I will screenshot the source she wants me to use for you.
2. 3. 4. 5. Disclaimer: This is a machine generated PDF of selected content from our products. This functionality is provided solely for your convenience and is in no way intended to replace original scanned PDF. Neither Cengage Learning nor its licensors make any representations or warranties with respect to the machine generated PDF. The PDF is automatically generated "AS IS" and "AS AVAILABLE" and are not retained in our systems. CENGAGE LEARNING AND ITS LICENSORS SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ANY AND ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY WARRANTIES FOR AVAILABILITY, ACCURACY, TIMELINESS, COMPLETENESS, NON- INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Your use of the machine generated PDF is subject to all use restrictions contained in The Cengage Learning Subscription and License Agreement and/or the Gale Literature Resource Center Terms and Conditions and by using the machine generated PDF functionality you agree to forgo any and all claims against Cengage Learning or its licensors for your use of the machine generated PDF functionality and any output derived therefrom. Irony in 'The Garden Party,' Author: Ben Satterfield Date: Winter 1982 From: Ball State University Forum(Vol. 23, Issue 1) Reprint In: Short Story Criticism(Vol. 23) Document Type: Critical essay Length: 1,383 words Full Text: [In the following essay, Satterfield contends that “irony is the keynote” for understanding “The Garden Party.”] All of the writing on Katherine Mansfield's most anthologized story recognizes or implies that “The Garden-Party” is a fable of initiation. The general interpretation argues that Laura goes from her Edenic world to one in which death exists, and that archetypically she loses her innocence, thereby acquiring knowledge and reaching a point of initiation. Laura has a great discovery, true; but because of her inability to make any kind of statement about it that would serve to clarify its meaning, critics disagree on whether she will go on to learn more about life and death or
whether she will retreat into the sanctuary of the garden world. Much of the disagreement can be resolved, I believe, by a close examination of the irony—which has been largely ignored—and the function and effect of that irony upon the events of the story. Also, “The Garden-Party” contains two types of initiation, a fact mostly overlooked, and the initiations are not compatible, as the details of the story make evident. Irony is the keynote. The central character of “The Garden- Party,” Laura Sheridan, is protected from the exigencies of life and is unable to view reality (even death) except through the rose- tinted glasses provided by a delicate and insulated existence. Laura's world is a world of parties and flowers, a pristine world of radiant, bright canna lilies and roses, a precious and exclusive world. Laura's sister, Jose, is early described as a butterfly—and what creature is more delicate than a butterfly? That Jose chooses to sing a song about a weary life, obviously something she is unacquainted with, has to be ironic: in the Sheridan family, weariness and sorrow are merely lyrics to be mocked. Mansfield's exquisite use of imagery is as telling as her irony. For example, the flower imagery throughout the story serves to keep the reader reminded of the delicacy of Laura's world. The flowers are splendid, beautiful, and—what is not stated—short- lived. Laura, too, is beautiful, radiant, flower-like. But even the afternoon is likened to a flower: “And the perfect afternoon slowly ripened, slowly
faded, slowly its petals closed.” Laura, her vision attuned to the superficial, can see only the beauty and not the dying of the flower, and she cannot see that, in many ways, she is very much like a flower herself. The symbolism of Laura's hat as well as her name (from laurel, the victory crown) is apparent. Marvin Magalaner adroitly sums up the significance of both: “When the mother thus presents her daughter with her own party hat in typical coronation fashion, she is symbolically transferring to Laura the Sheridan heritage of snobbery, restricted social views, narrowness of vision—the garden party syndrome.” Surely this is the case, although Laura may not be aware of it. Hence here is an initiation that is true and subtle. But the strong irony of this story results from the contrast between the way Laura sees herself and the way the reader is led to see her. Laura has very little—if any—insight, a fact made manifest throughout “The Garden-Party.” Her dealings with the workmen illustrate her lack of awareness: she sees them as “extraordinarily nice,” apparently not realizing that their “niceness” is more than likely due to their roles as subordinates, mere hirelings. Laura does not even seem to realize that what to her is a delightful party is simply toil to the workmen. Self-absorbed and narcissistic, she takes the superficial at face value because both she and her perceptions lack depth. “She felt just like a work-girl” is stingingly ironic because the reader knows that Laura has absolutely no concept of the life of a work-girl, just as she has no idea of what lies behind the friendly veneer of the workmen. For her to
imagine that she would “get on much better with men like these” rather than the “silly boys” who come to her parties is an indication of how little general comprehension and self-understanding she possesses. The other obvious contrast in the story is between the gaiety on the top of the hill and the sorrow below. The death of a man intrudes upon Laura's affected sensibilities and she discusses the possibility of canceling the party, but, as we suspected, her conscience is easily assuaged (and by the symbolic hat, a distraction that serves to fix Laura permanently in her world). Nothing, positively nothing, is permitted to spoil the party; even the weather is described as “ideal”—a “perfect day for a garden-party.” In the Sheridan world, suffering and misery cannot take precedence over well-ordered but mundane social functions, and will not be allowed to interfere. Consequently, Laura, with uncommon self- centeredness, blots out the death of a common man until a more convenient time: “I'll remember it again after the party's over, she decided.” But even then, for her to realize that she is actually going to the house of the dead man is difficult because “kisses, voices, tinkling spoons, laughter, the smell of crushed grass were somehow inside her. She had no room for anything else.” Unmistakably she has room for little else than parties, and the closer she comes to
the house of the dead man the more she realizes her mistake, for here is a reality she does not want to face: it is so much easier to commiserate from the top of the hill—and then to go on with one's fun. When she actually views the dead man, she can see him only as she sees death, as something remote, far, far away. (In addition, she has no more understanding of why she is there than does the dead man's wife.) Death is so removed from Laura's insular life that it is unreal; it cannot really be experienced, much less coped with, so she sees it as she sees everything else, as something marvelous and beautiful. Just as Laura is unable to pierce the facade of the workmen, she is equally unable to see beyond the face of death, the stark reality of which is transformed into dream, and she sees the dead man as sleeping, happy, content. Any initiation into the mystery of life and death is incomplete, whereas the installation of Laura into the Sheirdan tradition is certain. That Katherine Mansfield could present two types of initiation, one profound and the other shallow, is a tribute to her consummate skill: the fact that the protagonist opts for the shallow in no way detracts from her art but serves to increase the poignancy of her tale and to mark its realism. Laura is not without sensitivity, but her sensitivity is sub- ordinated to the comforts and trappings of the Sheridan way of life. She is young and inexperienced, and she has been shielded from the harsher aspects of existence. Even after facing the reali ty of
death, however, she is unable to view it realistically and transforms it into a dream, into something wonderful and happy, something that will fit into the tableau of her resplendent world. The ironic tone has been too clearly established for the reader to take Laura's encounter as profoundly affecting. In this regard, “The Garden-Party” asserts itself as not just another story of the loss of innocence, but an alteration of a mythic pattern. The intimations of mortality are only vaguely perceived, and the story closes on a final note of irony: Laura apparently thinks that she has discovered something new about life, not an awesome truth, but something deep and ineffable, something she attempts to explain to her brother, but cannot. Unlike the emperor Augustus, who would sometimes say to his Senate, “Words fail me, my Lords; nothing I can utter could possibly indicate the depth of my feelings,” Laura seems more confused than moved, and her inability to articulate her feelings to her brother is a result of her failure to understand, her inability to grasp the full significance of what she has witnessed. “No matter. He quite understood.” That is, he understood as much as Laura. They both will in all likelihood remain in the refuge of their bright house on the hill and continue giving expensive, gay parties and toying with the surface of things until the petals of their own lives are closed. Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1996 Gale Research, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Loading... Gale Document Number: GALE|H1420000631 Disclaimer: This is a machine generated PDF of selected content from our products. This functionality is provided solely for your convenience and is in no way intended to replace original scanned PDF. Neither Cengage Learning nor its licensors make any representations or warranties with respect to the machine generated PDF. The PDF is automatically generated "AS IS" and "AS AVAILABLE" and are not retained in our systems. CENGAGE LEARNING AND ITS LICENSORS SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ANY AND ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY WARRANTIES FOR AVAILABILITY, ACCURACY, TIMELINESS, COMPLETENESS, NON- INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Your use of the machine generated PDF is subject to all use restrictions contained in The Cengage Learning Subscription and License Agreement and/or the Gale Literature Resource Center Terms and Conditions and by using the machine generated PDF functionality you agree to forgo any and all claims against Cengage Learning or its licensors for your use of the machine generated PDF functionality and any output derived therefrom.
Seeking the self in the garden: class, femininity and nature in To the Lighthouse, "Bliss" and "The Garden Party" Author: Rose Onans Date: Fall 2014 From: Virginia Woolf Miscellany(Issue 86) Publisher: Southern Connecticut State University Document Type: Critical essay Length: 2,811 words In Katherine Mansfield's short stories "Bliss" and "The Garden Party" and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse the garden is a space of attempted self-transformation through which the female protagonists seek to grow beyond the confines of their upper- middle class feminine roles. The garden is one of Western literature's most enduring and potent symbols, contextualizing cultural and literary discourse on knowledge, sexuality and nature (Morris and Sawyer 21). In Mansfield's and Woolf's work, however, as Shelley Saguaro argues, "the gardens themselves are imbued with contingency and transition, rather than represented as simple paradigms of paradise or retreat" (59). Mansfield and Woolf problematize the idea that the garden, as a natural space, offers a means to transcend the barriers of class and gender by highlighting the commodification of this space and the restrictive effects of the traditional equation of femininity with nature. Each of the three texts offers its own perspective on the connection between the garden and female subjugation and emancipation. When read together, therefore, they offer a more complete understanding of this relationship, complicating and expanding on the ideas in the individual texts.
The relationship between women and nature is immediately problematized in Woolf's To the Lighthouse through the character of Mrs Ramsay. Mrs Ramsay, as an "archetypal mother" figure (Transue 68) and wife who "did not like to be finer than her husband" (To the Lighthouse [TTL] 45) has been rightly understood as Woolf's fictional image of the "Angel in the House" that she describes in "Professions for Women";. "Sympathetic," "charming," "unselfish," excelling in "the arts of family life" and entirely self-sacrificing, the qualities of the Angel in the House ensure that she "never had a mind or a wish of her own" ("Professions"). These traits, although not quite so one- dimensionally presented in Mrs Ramsay, coalesce with the powerful natural imagery that Woolf utilizes to describe her. Mrs Ramsay "pour[ing] erect into the air a rain of energy [...] looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies were being fused into force, burning and illuminating [...] this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life" (TTL 42-43) draws upon the legacy of Western thought in which the feminine is equated with the natural (Kaplan 55). Yet "boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent"--fertile femininity is thus explicitly tied to the Angel in the House, who spends all her personal resources caring for her family (TTL 44). Maria DiBattista's analysis of Mrs Ramsay as being "in the novel's symbolic topography [...] at the center of a circle of life that encloses a green world of gardens and marriage" sums up what I argue is Woolf's problematization of the equation of women with nature by linking Woolf's view to the Angel in the House through the character of Mrs Ramsay (175).
This problem becomes particularly important when considering Mansfield's story "Bliss." Bertha Young, as a young upper- middle class housewife, rails against "idiotic civilisation," which means one has to keep one's body "shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle" (Katherine Mansfield. Selected Stories [KMSS] 111). Specifically uttered in response to Bertha's feeling of "bliss" and desire to "run instead of walk," this image of restriction by "civilisation" speaks of enclosure, objectification and commodification of the body and the subjugation of the desire to express natural emotion. This restriction becomes evident in Bertha's inability to express her thoughts and feelings to herself, her child and her husband, Harry, and most importantly can be seen as borne out in her sexual "coldness" with Harry and ambiguous feelings for her friend, Pearl Fulton (KMSS 122). Chantal Cornut-Gentille D'Arcy's reading of the "rare fiddle" as symbolic of the "political and sexual alienation of women" (244) highlights the artificially restrictive force of society, which is countered by the central symbol of the blooming pear tree in Bertha's garden. Bertha's initial feeling of being "shut up in a case" is at odds with her later interpretation of "the lovely pear tree with its wide open blossoms as a symbol for her own life" (KMSS 115). While the specific implications of this identification with the pear tree remain extensively debated, I see it as symbolic of Bertha's desire to "grow" herself out from the restrictions
of society. The garden thus becomes the site of Bertha's attempted personal growth. What this growth entails specifically for Bertha remains a matter for debate, but it places her subconscious desire for freedom to grow and express herself squarely within the natural realm through identification with her garden. As Saguaro highlights, despite "Bliss" being imbued with Biblical imagery and symbology, the garden's meaning is transitory rather than static; it is neither a space of redemption nor fall. The women-nature problem discussed in To the Lighthouse becomes extremely pertinent in relation to Bertha's self- identification with nature through the pear tree, and complicates the possibility of nature as an escape in opposition to artificial social and class constructs. The relevance of this issue to Bertha is important, as she is characterized as a more "modern" woman than Mrs Ramsay. While she is not a Victorian "Angel" per se, Bertha's predicament highlights Woolf's point as to the pervasive and subtle power of this idea of womanhood. The connection between the Angel in the House and the feminine natural ideal elucidated through Mrs Ramsay highlights the subtle inference in "Bliss" that Bertha's desire to be like the pear tree cannot offer a meaningful way out, laden as it is with problematic cultural significance. Even Bertha's implied dichotomy between nature and civilization is troubled in "Bliss." Mansfield exposes the commodified status of the garden, listing it among commodities Bertha and Harry are blessed with: they "don't have to worry about money" so they have "this absolutely satisfactory house and garden" (KMSS 115). Bertha's use of grapes to complement the purple carpet and even her amusement at envisaging one of
her dinner guests, Mrs Norman Knight, as a monkey suggests that rather than nature acting as an interruption on the artificial, it serves merely to complement it (112, 116). Her desire to identify with nature as a way out of the "case" of civilization's expectations is thus undercut by this reminder that the garden, and therefore Bertha, is not separate from cultural scripts but is, in fact, integral to them. Bertha too is not so far from being of the status of the "rare fiddle" after all. The commodification of the natural, exposing the garden as an upper-class space, is extended in Mansfield's "The Garden Party." As Angela Smith argues, the second line, "they could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it," reveals that the family is "in the habit of ordering what it wants," (KMSS 237; Smith 141), and from the opening line on, the commodification of the natural is heavily emphasized. Even the description of the roses simply highlights that they exist to serve the family's needs (Smith 141): "you could not help feeling they understand that roses are the only flowers to impress people at garden parties" (KMSS 237). Mansfield thus complicates the possibility of Laura achieving any kind of authentic break from her class in the garden. Less than half Bertha's age, Laura Sheridan is arguably not old enough to feel the full extent of the class constriction with which Bertha struggles. Laura, however, perceives the garden as a space to break from the affectations of her upbringing in order to have a genuine interaction with members of the working class, causing her to abandon her attempt to "copy her mother's voice" and look "severe" and instead feel "just like a work girl" (KMSS 239). Her keen awareness of "these absurd class distinctions," despite her
desire to believe that "she didn't feel them. Not a bit," precipitates her reaction to the death of the carter, and her eye-opening experience visiting his family (239). Despite Laura's budding awareness of class sensitivity, Mansfield further erodes the idea that the garden offers a natural space, apart from the decadence of the house, in which to break down class distinctions. This is evident through the contrast between Laura's own garden and the "garden patches" of the "little mean dwellings" of the working class in which "there was nothing but cabbage stalks, sick hens and tomato cans" (KMSS 245). This emphasis on the disparity between the gardens, and Mansfield's use of a polyphonic narrative voice throughout the story (Smith 140), means that the Sheridans' judgmental upper - class mentality informs Laura's belief that she can escape. The pervasiveness of this view that perceives poverty as "disgusting and sordid" continually interrupts Laura's experience, and ultimately highlights that Laura is nothing like a "work girl" (245). Yet Laura's reading of the dead man's face as "content"--"what did garden parties and baskets and lace frocks mean to him? He was far from all those things"--suggests that Laura still seeks to get away from "all those things" of her frivolous life (251). Her previous alignment of the means of this escape with the workmen and the garden, however, is sharply critiqued, not only by the emphasis on the garden as a wealthy space, but also by the reality of the dismal poverty that Laura witnesses when she enters a real working class space. As Smith argues, Mansfield's use of polyphony ensures that the effect of Laura's epiphany remains ambiguous, such as when she struggles to articulate to her brother her new sense of life the narrative voice takes over: "but what life was she couldn't explain. No matter. He quite
understood. 'Isn't it, darling?' said Laurie" (251). Laura is "poised on the edge of a greater revelation" that remains inconclusive as "we are taken back to the tone of the opening, with the perception that rites of passage are not easily achieved" (Smith 144). In situating Laura's initial personal conflict with class in the garden Mansfield creates a spatial metaphor for the need for distance from class paradigms to allow for Laura's natural process of self- discovery. Yet the continued insertion of the upper-class voice into the narrative speaks to the fact that even the garden is a commodified and class-designated space, offering an explanation for why this rite of passage remains thwarted. To an extent, Bertha and Laura can be seen as intermediary characters between Mrs Ramsay and Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse. Unlike Mrs Ramsay, who exemplifies the traditional role of women, Bertha and Laura are aware of their class and gender roles and push these boundaries. Yet for both characters the ultimate effect remains ambiguous and under-realized. Lily and Mrs Ramsay, however, emblematize a diverging trajectory for women; while Mrs Ramsay remains static, Lily forges a new path for herself through the strength she gains from her painting, thus achieving the personal independence that evades Mrs Ramsay and Bertha. Her vision at the end of the novel, seen as an instance of a woman "freely choosing to engage in conscious, self defining activity" that is "rare in modernism" (Pease 21) is the culmination of the self-confidence that she develops as a result of her painting. Charles Tansley's criticism "'Women can't paint, women can't write'" characterizes the view
of women's endeavours that fall outside of their traditional circle (TTL 54). In the crucial dinner scene at the end of the first chapter, "The Window," Lily initially conceives of herself in natural terms as bending "like corn under a wind" from Tansley's ridicule, conforming in the moment to the passive feminine role of appeasement embodied by Mrs Ramsay (94). Lily only recovers "with a great and rather painful effort"' by remembering "there's my painting; I must move the tree to the middle; that matters--nothing else" (94). Her remembrance that "she too had her work" gives her a foundation from which to define herself, to move beyond her feminine role in conversation with Tansley and deny Mrs Ramsay's wish that she marry (92). In the context of our discussion, situating Lily's act of painting in the garden, which has as its subject Mrs Ramsay reading to her son, James, is highly significant. Painting both the garden and the garden-like Mrs Ramsay, Lily is able to assert control over the image, and thus is able to reduce the Madonna-esque image of Mrs Ramsay and James into "a purple shadow without irreverence" (59). Just as her investment in her "work" allows Lily to remove herself from the feminine destiny of marriage and sexual politics, her act of painting in the garden externalizes her from it. Rather than being identified personally with the natural world like Mrs Ramsay (via reference to her fecundity) or seeking growth and escape through access to it like Laura and Bertha, Lily imposes her vision upon the scene, thus in a parallel act removing herself from what DiBattista pertinently calls the "circle of life that encloses [...] gardens and marriage" (175). While the influence of Mrs Sheridan. Laura's mother, is felt right to the end of "The Garden Party," preventing Laura from fulfilling
her journey toward self-definition, the artistic act of reducing the mother and child to a shadow in the final version of the painting parallels Lily's realization that because Mrs Ramsay has died the metaphorical Angel in the House has died with her, so that "we can override her wishes, improve away her limited, old- fashioned ideas" (TTL 190). This process is not as simple as superseding the older generation; Lily must complete a highly complex process of taking control over both the garden and the Angel in the House ideal of womanhood so that it does not take control of her. By externalizing herself from both, she does not entangle herself in the problems associated with identification with the garden. She simultaneously breaks down the class expectations upon herself, not by seeking out the garden as a neutral space to avoid class restrictions, but rather by engaging with and defeating them by finding in the garden the subject and space for meaningful work. For both Mansfield and Woolf, thus, the garden becomes a highly contested space imbued with the effects of the class system. To differing degrees, the texts explore this idea in terms of the problems of the commodification of nature paralleling the commodification of women and the pervasive equation of femininity with nature as a means of restricting women within a "generative cycle" (Kaplan 65). Written at a time when Woolf noted the necessity for women to "kill the Angel in the House" in order to "have a mind of their own," the texts speak to the period of transition in the understanding of the role of women. While I have not suggested that the works discussed here have any relationship with one another beyond that of their subject matter, I have argued that the idea of the garden becoming a space of attempted self-transformation functions at a deep level within
the concerns of all three narratives. In advancing Lily as the example of a successful attempt to define the female self through a relationship with the garden I do not promote her as a solution to the problems encountered in Mansfield's stories but suggest that her character highlights the difficulties faced by women turning to nature to try and escape the confines of human class constructs. The garden, thus, provides Mansfield and Woolf with a spatial metaphor for the need to achieve both distance from and engagement with class influence, and by functioning as such in their work provides the means for them to achieve this themselves. Works Cited D'Arcy, Chantal Cornut-Gentille. "Katherine Mansfield's 'Bliss': The Rare Fiddle as Emblem of the Political and Sexual Alienation of Women." Papers on Language and Literature 35.3 (1999): 244-69. DiBattista, Maria. "To the Lighthouse: Virginia Woolf's Winter's Tale." Virginia Woolf: Revaluation and Continuity, a Collection of Essays. Ed. Ralph Freeman. Berkeley: U of California P, 1980. 161-88. Kaplan, Sydney Janet. Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Mansfield, Katherine. Katherine Mansfield. Selected Stories. Ed. D. M. Davin. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Morris, Paul and Deborah Sawyer, eds. A Walk in the Garden: Biblical, Iconographical and Literary Images of Eden. Sheffield:
JSOT Press, 1992. Pease, Allison. Modernism, Feminism and the Culture of Boredom. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. Saguaro, Shelley. Garden Plots: The Politics and Poetics of Gardens. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing, 2006. Smith, Angela. Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1999. Transue, Pamela J. Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Style. Albany: State U of New York P, 1986. Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Camberwell: Penguin Books Australia, 2010. --. "Professions for Women." The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. [email protected], The University of Adelaide, 2014. n. pag. Web. 1 November 2014. <https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w7woolf/ virginia/>. Rose Onans Monash University Onans, Rose Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Southern Connecticut State University http://www.home.southernct.edu/~neverowv1/vwm.html
Source Citation Onans, Rose. "Seeking the self in the garden: class, femininity and nature in To the Lighthouse, 'Bliss' and 'The Garden Party'." Virginia Woolf Miscellany, no. 86, 2014, p. 21+. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A418088225/LitRC?u=hunt25841&sid= LitRC&xid=e7c08c64. Accessed 24 Apr. 2021. Gale Document Number: GALE|A418088225 http://www.home.southernct.edu/~neverowv1/vwm.html Disclaimer: This is a machine generated PDF of selected content from our products. This functionality is provided solely for your convenience and is in no way intended to replace original scanned PDF. Neither Cengage Learning nor its licensors make any representations or warranties with respect to the machine generated PDF. The PDF is automatically generated "AS IS" and "AS AVAILABLE" and are not retained in our systems. CENGAGE LEARNING AND ITS LICENSORS SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ANY AND ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY WARRANTIES FOR AVAILABILITY, ACCURACY, TIMELINESS, COMPLETENESS, NON- INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Your use of the machine generated PDF is subject to all use restrictions contained in The Cengage Learning
Subscription and License Agreement and/or the Gale Literature Resource Center Terms and Conditions and by using the machine generated PDF functionality you agree to forgo any and all claims against Cengage Learning or its licensors for your use of the machine generated PDF functionality and any output derived therefrom. An overview of 'The Garden Party,' Author: Jennifer Rich Date: From: Gale Online Encyclopedia Publisher: Gale Document Type: Work overview; Critical essay Length: 2,109 words About this Work Title: The Garden Party (Short story) Published: January 01, 1922 Genre: Short story Author: Mansfield, Katherine Occupation: New Zealander short story writer Other Names Used: Beauchamp, Kathleen Mansfield; Murry, Kathleen Beauchamp; Petrovsky, Boris; Stanley, Elizabeth (New Zealander writer); Full Text: [Rich is an instructor of literature, composition, and gender issues at Marymount Manhattan College. In the following essay, she examines ways in which “The Garden Party” uses contrasts between social classes to illustrate how the classes define each other.] Most criticism of Katherine Mansfield's short story “The
Garden Party” concentrates on the story as a truncated bildungsroman–a story of the growth and maturity of a young idealistic character. Critics such as Daniel S. Taylor in “Crashing the Garden Party: A Dream, A Wakening,” for example, see Laura's initiation as a passage from the “dream world of her parents and social class to the real world of the Sheridan's neighboring working-class.” As Taylor notes, describing the symbolic significance of the garden party, “The garden party epitomizes the dream world of the Sheridan women, a world whose underlying principle is the editing and rearranging of reality for the comfort and pleasure of its inhabitants. Its war is with the real world, whose central and final truth is death.” Similarly, Clare Hansen and Andrew Gurr, in “The Stories: Sierre and Paris,” discuss Laura's evolution into adulthood as taking place in the context of a gulf between rich and poor–a gulf that is indicated by the Mansfield's oppositional descriptions of the world of the Sheridans and the world of their less fortunate neighbors: Words such as “perfect,” “delicious,” “beautiful,” “splendor,” “radiant,” “exquisite,” “brilliant,” “rapturous,” “charming,” “delightful,” “stunning,” convey the outward beauty of the Sheridan's life... In striking contrast are words describing the working people and Saunders lane: “haggard,” “mean,” “ poverty-stricken,” “revolting,” “disgusting,” “sordid,” “crablike,” “wretched.” Given that “The Garden Party” was written in 1922 at the height of Marxist movements across Europe and Russia– which, among
other things, attempted to understand class structure and identity–it is necessary to explore the way in which “The Garden Party” presents a picture of class interdependence. Specifically, “The Garden Party” is interesting to investigate for the way it portrays families like the Sheridans as being dependent for their class - identity on their always nearby working-class neighbors. Thus, rather than conceptualizing the worlds of the Sheridans and the worlds of the Scotts as diametric opposites whose paths seldom cross, we shall explore the way in which “The Garden Party” presents the two worlds as always meeting and clashing–defining one and the other through their continual juxtaposition. “The Garden Party” is structured around the preparations for an early afternoon garden party. The sense of the Sheridans as inhabiting a dream-like world is set out in the very first lines when the narrator comments on the ideal weather conditions for the garden party. “And after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud.” The family, and particularly its female members, seem to derive their life-force from the carefree atmosphere in which they live. In the story's first scene, Meg, one of Laura's sisters, is seen sipping coffee, hair washed, wrapped in a green turban. Jose, another sister, is simply described as a butterfly who always “came down in a silk petticoat and a kimono jacket.” Mansfield, however, does not allow this sense of early morning luxuriance to go uninterrupted. Immediately, those
upon whom the Sheridan sisters' luxury depends burst in upon this scene of lazy breakfast-taking. Their entrance is signaled by a break in the narrator's description of the garden and weather: “Breakfast was not yet over before the men came to put up the marquee.” The now down-to-earth tone of this sentence connotes linguistically a clash between the lives of the Sheridan sisters and the men who must come at dawn to put up the marquee for the party. This interruption is further signaled when Laura, the main character who throughout the story attempts to bridge personally these two ever-present worlds, runs out to meet the workmen with breakfast–the signifier of her “Sheridan” life–in hand. Significantly, Laura feels embarrassed still holding the bread and butter when she comes to meet the workmen: “Laura wished now that she had not got the bread-and-butter, but there was nowhere to put it and she couldn't possibly throw it away.” The reason for this awkwardness is precisely that the bread and butter, the piece of Sheridan life which she has taken with her, defines her to the workmen as not one of them but as opposite from them, and upper class. Laura attempts to mediate that duality by playing both roles–taking a big workman-like bite from her slice of refined Sheridan life while thinking of the “absurdity of class distinctions.”
While Laura is exulting in her camaraderie with the workmen, one of them catches her attention. He seems somewhat apart from his compatriot–he does not share the general frivolity, and functions to once again remind Laura of their difference. Discussing the placement of the marquee, Laura remarks that there will be a band playing at the party. To this the workman replies, “H'm, going to have a band, are you?” After this remark, Laura notices that this workman “was pale,” and with a “haggard look as his dark eyes scanned the tennis court.” At this very moment, however, of a sense of mutual alienation, the workman picks and smells a sprig of lavender from the garden. Witnessing this, Laura feels their differences evaporate and “wonder(s) at him for caring for things like that–caring for the smell of lavender.” Once again, then, a moment of antimony, of unmediated difference of “two worlds,” is mediated by an action, this time on the part of one of the workmen rather than Laura. This sense of similar class identities is short-lived, however, as the narrative continues with the continued clashing and jarring of the two worlds. In fact, during the rest of the story there is never a moment where Saunders Lane is forgotten. Even at the dreamiest point in the Sheridan world, Saunders Lane is suggested in some way or another. For example, after Laura has met the workmen, she settles down for a moment and listens to the sound of the house. As she listens she finds that the house is an airy delight, “every door seemed open... And the house was alive with soft, quick steps and running voices.” Even this momentary enjoyment of
the house's heavenly comfort is interrupted by Saunders Lane. The interruption comes in the form of “a long chuckling absurd sound. It was the heavy piano being moved on its stiff castors.” Although we are told that Meg and Jose are involved in moving the piano, it is the servant Hans's physical labor that Laura undoubtedly overhears. A more humorous (if not satirical) moment of potential mediation between the two worlds of the story is Jose's absurd song with which she tests her voice. Jose has been earlier described as a “butterfly”–a girl of cream-puffs and linen dresses, and of course garden parties. Yet, the song that she sings is decidedly not of this type: “This life is Wee-ary ,/A Tear–A Sigh./A Love that Chan- ges/This life is Wee-ary.” Rather than the expected moment of unity between the Sheridan house and Saunders Lane, the absurd pairing of an emotionally calloused character like Jose with a song of sorrow and desperation serves instead to remind the reader that it is precisely the weariness of others that makes possible Jose's butterfly-like existence. This antithesis of expression and experience is punctuated by Jose's actions at the close of the song, But at the word “goodbye”, and although the piano sounded more desperate than ever, her face broke into a brilliant, dreadfully unsympathetic smile, 'Aren't I in good voice, Mummy?' This mismatch of expression and character is underscored by
the fact that this song is preceded by Jose giving orders to the servant, Hans, to rearrange the tables and to sweep the rug. The garden party is itself not fully described in the story. We are only privy to certain snatches of conversation–and these tell us that it has been a success, with Laura the center of much attention because of her black hat. Before the garden party, Laura's mother, Mrs. Sheridan, had distracted Laura from thinking about the dead laborer and her wish to cancel the garden party by enticing her with a black hat. Laura had at first resisted this appeal to her vanity, but once she leaves her mother's bedroom, she catches a glimpse of herself in the hat in her bedroom mirror. What she sees startles her, and serves to obliterate the image of the dead laborer. There, quite by chance, the first thing she saw was this charming girl in the mirror, in her black hat trimmed with gold daisies, and a long velvet black ribbon. Never had she imaged she could look like that.... Just for a moment she had another glimpse of that poor woman and those little children, and the body being carried into the house. But it all seemed so blurred, unreal, like a picture in the newspaper. The hat thus functions at this moment to reinforce more than ever the division between the world of the Sheridans and the world of the Scotts. Suffused with vanity as a result of the hat's charm, Laura forgets the tragedy down the hill, and more than ever desires to continue with the garden party. Even when confronted with her brother, Laurie–the family member with whom she is most emotionally
intimate–Laura decides not to tell him of Scott once he has complemented her on her hat. Ironically, the hat–after the garden party–is a catalyst for a moment of understanding/connection between Laura's world and the world of the Scotts. After the party, Laura's mother suggests that Laura take a basket of party scraps down to Scott's widow. At first, Laura questions the appropriateness of this gesture, but is soon convinced. Mrs. Sheridan also insists that Laura “run down just as [she is]”–in party dress and hat. Arriving at Saunders Lane, Laura soon feels awkward because of the way in which she is dressed. This awkwardness, I would argue, signals a moment of insight for Laura into the lives of the workers who live on this lane. She is disturbed because of the brightness of her frock and the extravagance of the famous hat: “how her frock shone! And the big hat with the velvet streamer–if only it was another hat!” Noting the difference between her dress and that of the laborers–tweed capped men and shawled women–Laura realizes the life absent of carefree happiness that the inhabitants of Saunders Lane must endure. A bright frock and an extravagant hat have no home here. Like the bread and butter episode, this piece of Sheridan life reveals to her the almost unsurmountable disjuncture between her life and the lives of these workers. The hat also functions to create another moment of insight for Laura when she is alone with the body of the laborer. When Laura enters the Scott home, she is immediately confronted with the
sorrow-ravaged face of the laborer's widow. Although Laura tries to escape as soon as it is possible, the widow's sister insists that she view the now-peaceful body of Mr. Scott. Laura is soon overwhelmed by the peacefulness of the expression on the laborer's face; particularly she is overcome by the remoteness of his appearance. “He was given up to his dream. What did garden- parties and baskets and lace frocks matter to him? He was far from all those things. He was wonderful, beautiful. While they were laughing and while the band was playing, this marvel had come to the lane.” Laura feels that she can not leave Scott without saying something that would indicate the affect that he has had on her – “She gave out a loud, childish sob... 'Forgive my hat,' she said.” Although her plea is undoubtedly comical and absurd, it also carries within it a significant moment of understanding. As we have seen, the hat has heretofore functioned as a prime signifier of the division between the two worlds–earlier, the hat had caused Laura to forget the tragedy just down the hill. By apologizing for her hat, Laura is also apologizing for what it represents–class snobbery, selfishness, and the almost unsurmountable psychological and social division between the world of the laborers and the world of the Sheridans. The hat, then, here facilitates a moment of connection–of class similarity–through its very significance as a symbol of division and antimony. The story concludes with Laura meeting her brother,
Laurie, in Saunders Lane. Her demeanor with him indicates that she has been touched by the universality of death and life–both know neither class borders nor garden parties. Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2021 Gale, a Cengage Company Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Rich, Jennifer. "An overview of 'The Garden Party,'." Gale Online Encyclopedia, Gale, 2021. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1420003151/LitRC?u=hunt25841&sid =LitRC&xid=eaf790ac. Accessed 24 Apr. 2021. Gale Document Number: GALE|H1420003151 Disclaimer: This is a machine generated PDF of selected content from our products. This functionality is provided solely for your convenience and is in no way intended to replace original scanned PDF. Neither Cengage Learning nor its licensors make any representations or warranties with respect to the machine generated PDF. The PDF is automatically generated "AS IS" and "AS AVAILABLE" and are not retained in our systems. CENGAGE LEARNING AND ITS LICENSORS SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ANY AND ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY WARRANTIES FOR AVAILABILITY, ACCURACY, TIMELINESS, COMPLETENESS, NON- INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Your use of the machine generated PDF is subject to
all use restrictions contained in The Cengage Learning Subscription and License Agreement and/or the Gale Literature Resource Center Terms and Conditions and by using the machine generated PDF functionality you agree to forgo any and all claims against Cengage Learning or its licensors for your use of the machine generated PDF functionality and any output derived therefrom. The Image of Class in Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’: A Working-Class Critique Author: Maureen Murphy Date: 1998 From: The Image of Class in Literature, Media, and Society: Selected Papers, 1998 Conference, Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, March 12-14, 1998, Colorado Springs, Colorado Publisher: Soc. for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, U of Southern Colorado Reprint In: Short Story Criticism(Vol. 235. ) Document Type: Critical essay Length: 3,931 words Full Text: [(essay date 1998) In the following essay, Murphy contends that “The Garden Party” presents the working class as “Other” in order to naturalize the middle-class perspective. Murphy concludes that rather than learning something meaningful at the end of the story, Laura simply “responds to death the same way she has been taught to respond to the world—to prettify it.”] In “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading,”
Patrocinio Schweickart describes the situation of a woman reading a male text in which “woman” is constructed as Other. The example she uses is from Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but the situation, she says, is a common one in which “women are taught to think as men, to identify with a male point of view, and to accept as normal and legitimate a male system of values, one of whose central principle is misogyny” (199). This situation, according to Schweickart, doubles the female reader’s oppression (199). I propose that a similar situation arises from class differences presented in literature in which working class is constructed as Other while a middle class perspective is presented as “universal.” Working class readers are thus taught to think as middle class, to identify with a middle class point of view, and to accept as normal and legitimate a view which often belittles and devalues their own experiences. To illuminate this situation, I will employ a critique modeled on the feminist critique presented in Schwiekart’s article, in which the critic resists the “universal” viewpoint and allows herself instead to identify with Other. The text I have chosen to subject to this critique is Katherine Mansfield’s short story “The Garden Party”, for several reasons. First, this story, written from a bourgeois perspective, overtly constructs the working class as Other; second, my reading of the story differs significantly from other readings; third, my daughter brought this story home from her English class, complaining about the
textbook in which it appeared, which she said missed the whole point of the story. I read the story thinking I could help her answer the questions, but as it turned out, I agreed with her. The explanations of the story in the textbook seemed to me to be based on a reading which mistook class distinctions as viewed by a bourgeois and unreliable narrator for actual, real world class difference. In this reading, the story is about the gulf that exists between the rich and the poor (Best) rather than, as it is for me, a story about a young girl learning to take her place in society through the careful construction of class distinctions. In my reading, those distinctions are constructed by an unreliable, middle class narrator and not by the text itself, which in fact represents those distinctions in a manner which interrogates and, ultimately, resists the point-of-view character’s class identity. That to date I have found no critical response to the story which supports this interpretation does not deter me from offering the following as a valid reading. “The Garden Party” is the story of the household of a well -to-do family preparing to give an afternoon garden party. The story is told from the point-of-view of the younger daughter, Laura. The rest of the household consists of Laura’s mother, her brother Laurie, sisters Meg and Jose, and a variety of servants and workers, whom my daughter’s textbook refers to as “simply part of the setting” (Best 38). When workmen come to prepare the house and grounds for the party, the reader observes Laura’s first encounter with the Other: “Four men in their shirt-sleeves stood grouped together
on the garden path. They carried staves covered with rolls of canvas, and they had big tool-bags slung on their backs. They were impressive” (69). Laura’s mother has given her the job of directing the workers, who will put up a marquee. From the beginning, Laura is conscious of class distinctions as she “tried to look severe and even a little bit short-sighted as she came up to them” (69). She has not yet fully assimilated those distinctions, however, as she will by the end of the story: “‘Good morning,’ she said, copying her mother’s voice. But that sounded so fearfully affected that she was ashamed, and stammered like a little girl” (69-70). In spite of Laura’s assertion of artistic superiority (Laura “loved having to arrange things; she always felt she could do it so much better than anybody else” (69)), the workmen demonstrate to the reader that they know best. They have their own ideas; though Laura gives directions, the workers make decisions and carry them out on their own: “‘Look here, miss, that’s the place. Against those trees … That’ll do fine’” (71). Must that be the place? It must: “Already the workmen had shouldered their staves and were making for the place” (71). In addition to making and carrying out their own decisions, these workmen refuse to participate in Laura’s constructed differences and
conventions: “You see, with a thing like a marquee,” and he turned to Laura in his easy way, “you want to put it somewhere where it’ll give you a bang slap in the eye, if you follow me.” Laura’s upbringing made her wonder for a moment whether it was quite respectful of a workman to talk to her of bangs slap in the eye.(70) To Laura such friendliness and familiarity are evidence of impropriety and ignorance of proper behavior, but to the reader whose allegiance shifts, as mine invariably does, to the workmen, their behavior is familiar and not at all improper; it is Laura’s attitude that becomes that of Other. The men treat her as the child she is, not as if she were superior. These workmen refuse to fit Laura’s preconceptions, and so she forms new distinctions in whi ch the working class become, in a manner Regenia Gagnier asserts is common to middle class culture, “picturesque (nonthreatening) Others” (104): “Why couldn’t she have workmen for friends rather than the silly boys she danced with and who came to Sunday night supper? She would get on much better with men like these … It’s all the fault, she decided … of these absurd class distinctions” (72). Laura’s awareness of class distinctions allows her to question those distinctions, but she is able to do little more than question. The text mocks her response in the next lines, “Just to prove how happy she was, just to show the tall fellow how at home she was, and how she despised stupid conventions, Laura took a big bite of her bread-and-butter …” (72).
A similar ineffective response occurs during the course of the day, when news comes that a workman in a nearby cottage has been killed. Laura, sensitive to these new acquaintances she has made, wants to cancel the party. Her sister Jose, who presents an interesting contrast to Laura at this point in the story, disagrees. “Her eyes hardened. She looked at (Laura) just as she used to when they were little and fighting together. ‘You won’t bring a drunken workman back to life by being sentimental,’ she said softly” (82). Laura, just as she used to do when they were children, goes off to tell her mother. But “[t]o Laura’s astonishment” (83), her mother agrees with Jose. Both accuse Laura of being “extravagant” in her feelings for the workers. The depth of Laura’s feelings is revealed when her mother distracts her with a new hat. As she leaves her mother’s room, Laura sees herself in the mirror. “Never before had she imagined she could look like that. Is mother right? she thought. And now she hoped her mother was right … Perhaps it was extravagant” (84)— extravagant not to have a new hat but to expend so much feeling on workers. The ironic use of the term “extravagant” clearly mocks Laura and the world she lives in. It is this authorial voice which is denied to Katherine Mansfield by my daughter’s textbook and to the critical reactions to “A Garden Party”. This distinction, clearly evident when one’s allegiance shifts from narrator to worker, is evident
from the opening lines of the story: And after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. … The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine. As for the roses, you could not help feeling they understood that roses are the only flowers that impress people at garden parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing. Hundreds, yes, literally hundreds (of roses) had come out in a single night; the green bushes bowed down as though they had been visited by archangels.(Mansfield 68) My daughter’s textbook describes this scene as “light and heavenly” (Best 36); most critical response sees it as Edenic. Anna Friis claims that “The world that Katherine Mansfield shows us in her stories, glows with beauty. It fills our senses with delight and overpowers us with its loveliness” (174-5). I submit that this delight might depend on whether one views this world from the point of view of an “extravagant” girl, or from the point of view of “the gardener who had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them” (68). As I demonstrate below, the Modernist Mansfield provides both perspectives. Critical response to Mansfield is hampered by critics who tend to view her writing simply as confessional and autobiographical. Sidney Janet Kaplan in Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction states the case: “The question of the relation of life to art, personal experience to completed literary object, becomes especially complicated in the case of a woman writer,
for it is at the center of the problematic critical response to women’s writing in general, in that everything a woman writes has usually been assumed to be a function of her autobiographical impulse, either confession or wish fulfillment” (171). Ian A. Gordon, a New Zealand critic, clearly falls into this category of “problematic critical response.” He states, “Katherine Mansfield to a degree almost unparalleled in English fiction put her own experiences into her stories. She wrote of nothing that did not happen to her” (7). “Based so directly on her own experiences, her range is even more restricted than Jane Austen’s,” he claims, with not more than half a dozen themes. One of the themes he allows her is depicting the world of children, which she does magnificently, in Gordon’s judgment, in “The Garden Party” by letting the reader participate in Laura’s experience of the world. Sylvia Berkman also notes autobiographical elements, observing, as do many others, that the garden where Mansfield played often with her brother Leslie, later to die in the war, is the very garden of “The Garden Party”. Though Berkman acknowledges that “Katherine Mansfield rejected the society into which she was born” (11), this knowledge does not affect her reading of the story, which to her is nostalgic for that earlier, innocent time. Berkman’s response is hampered in that she is unwilling to credit Mansfield
with the reasoning powers of other writers: Like Joyce, [Mansfield] never recovered from this act of violence [i.e., leaving her home] … [However, she] had not Joyce’s highly trained, dialectical mind; she was not impelled to break away, through will or reason … Her act in leaving Wellington was an act of instinctive assertion. … [Because she was] of a more yielding composition … In time she came to look upon New Zealand as a lost paradise, transmuting her childhood memories into the nostalgic beauty of her finest work.(11) “The Garden Party” is indeed one of her finest works, but this description, it seems to me, is more fitting of Laura than of the author. Confusing the voices of narrator and author is also an issue in the way my daughter’s textbook explains the opening scene: You might think that the description of a nice day is rather overdone. Yet the extravagance has a purpose. “The Garden Party” is a story of contrasts, as you have seen, and the author is preparing you for the shock of the scene that comes later: The lane began, smoky and dark. … A low hum came from the mean little cottages. In some of them there was a flicker of light, and a shadow, crab-like, moved across the window. …(36) … even the people are dark and their shadows are crab-like—as if it were the underworld. One setting conveys a feeling of absolute joy; the other projects abject misery. Two settings and two contrasting situations develop one theme—the huge gulf, both physical and psychological, between the rich and poor in society. This scene occurs after the party is over when Laura, in
acknowledgment of her concern for the workers, is sent to the bottom of the lane in a kind of ritual, carrying a basket of cakes, fancy sandwiches, and cream puffs for the bereaved family. According to Regenia Gagnier, “In middle class fiction, when a crisis of irreconcilability occurs between the two classes (e.g. “masters and men’ find their interests irreconcilable) … it is redirected from class conflict to romantic love and Christian charity” (113). Indeed, Laura’s questioning of class distinctions dissipates in this final scene. As Laura carries her basket of goodies to the bottom of the lane, for the first time in the story, her imagination takes her into a frightening and alien world, the world, for her, of Other. I submit, however, that there is nothing presented by the text that shows this place as the dark “underworld” (Best 36), except through the narrator and her own class-bound reactions. Laura is frightened, but the text presents nothing which is frightening; it is Laura herself and her “upbringing” which create the fear: “A dark knot of people stood outside … Oh, to be away from this! She actually said, ‘Help me, God,’ as she walked up the tiny path and knocked … to her horror the woman answered, ‘Walk in, please, miss’” (90). If the reader allows his/her perspective to shift from narrator to Other, this “underworld” seems not very dark or scary at all —in fact it is at least as normal as, if not more than, the garden party itself. When Laura enters that gathering at the foot of the lane, she is treated like any other. As a participant in many such gatherings, I see her gift of food not as charity as she feared, but as the contribution of any other member of the community. She is
invited into their grief. This is all so alien to her, but to one to whom it is not alien, it is Laura who is constructing that Otherness. Whereas earlier her words were “exquisite,” “delicious,” “radiant,” “rapturous,” “charming,” now the words are “haggard,” “mean,” “sordid,” “crab-like,” “wretched.” These are Laura’s words, and this reader trusts her words in this scene no more than earlier in her exaggerated and imaginative descriptions. Laura is accepted into this gathering and constructs her own discomfort the same way she has imaginatively constructed the beauty of her own world. After Laura enters the little cottage at the end of the lane, she comes face to face with a horror that does not exist in her prior, Edenic world. She is ushered in to the room displaying the dead workman’s body. This is what she sees: … so remote, so peaceful. He was dreaming … He was wonderful, beautiful. While they were laughing and while the band was playing, this marvel had come to the lane. Happy … happy … All is well, said that sleeping face. This is just as it should be. I am content.(Mansfield 92) The usual interpretation of this climactic scene is that Laura experiences a genuine epiphany and comes to a new understanding of the ways in which beauty and ugliness can be reconciled (Hankin 240-1). Certainly Laura’s response to the dead man separates her from the people in the cottage, from the wife whose “face, puffed up, red, with swollen eyes and swollen lips, looked terrible” (91).
However, her response unites her with her sister Jose by paralleling an earlier scene in the story in which Jose sings a mournful song, foreshadowing the later events in the cottage. Earlier Jose has … clasped her hands. She looked mournfully and enigmatically at her mother and Laura as they came in. “This Life is Wee-ary, A Tear—a Sigh. A Love that Chan-ges, This Life is Wee-ary, A Tear—a Sigh. A Love that Chan-ges, And then … Goodbye!” But at the word “Good-bye,” and although the piano sounded more desperate than ever, [Jose’s] face broke into a brilliant, dreadfully unsympathetic smile. “Aren’t I in good voice, mummy?” she beamed.(76-7) Although earlier Laura had been horrified by Jose’s uncaring response, in the final scene we hear her false wail and see that Laura too is unable or unwilling to acknowledge suffering and pain. She denies even her own experience of sadness and death.
“I say, you’re not crying, are you?” asked her brother. Laura shook her head. She was. Laurie put his arm round her shoulder. “Don’t cry,” he said in his warm, loving voice. “Was it awful?” “No,” sobbed Laura. “It was simply marvelous.”(92-3) Far from coming to a reconciliation of beauty and death, Laura responds to death the same way she has been taught to respond to the world—to prettify it. At the end of the lane, where the Sheridan children were forbidden to go when they were younger “because of the revolting language and of what they might catch” (82), the reader comprehends the completeness of Laura’s initiation into her class role. C. A. Hankin gives the most complete interpretation of “The Garden Party”, in which she notes, “The fact that the rich can avoid (or attempt to avoid) the unpleasant realities of human existence, even summon up beauty and elegance at will, is conveyed in the very first paragraph” (237). Hankin is aware of all the class dimensions of the story, pointing out “Laura’s inner division” as she is torn between two world, the artificially beautiful world of her class and the natural world of the working class. However, Hankin interprets the final scene in the story no differently from other critics, that Laura experiences an epiphany which reconciles “ugliness and
death” with “a personal vision of beauty and hope” (241), although the interpretation leaves her uncomfortable: “we are left with the uneasy feeling that she has let her character off too lightly” (241). “There is a sense,” Hankin says, “in which Katherine Mansfield has granted us, too, a reprieve; has assuaged both our guilt about social inequalities and our haunting anxiety about death” (241). The problem with these interpretations is that they participate too fully in Laura’s perspective, accepting the class distinctions Laura makes as “real,” rather than constructed and conveyed by an unreliable narrator. So too do these interpretations allow readers to participate in a world-view that avoids, as does Laura, acknowledging the unpleasantries of living. “The Garden Party” is the last story Mansfield wrote before her early death from a prolonged struggle with tuberculosis. This story is frequently cited as evidence of her acceptance of and reconciliation with both the death of her brother in WWI and with her own death (Berkman, Hankin). That the story, rather, presents a critique of way of living that did not prepare her for either death is a possibility readers seem unprepared or unwilling to acknowledge. Indeed, the conventional interpretation allows readers, with no assistance from Mansfield, to, as Hankin stated (above), assuage “both our guilt about social inequities and our haunting anxiety about death.” Sidney Janet Kaplan has demonstrated, from letters and journals, that Mansfield was suspicious of epiphanies, as she
was suspicious of the personal in fiction, believing, as other modernist writers, that art needed to move from personal immediacy. (180-2) She points out that Mansfield, in other stories, parodied epiphanic revelation: “Although ‘the moment’ contains many of the features of epiphanic revelation, Mansfield makes sure that we do not mistake it for genuine enlightenment” (186). Kaplan also demonstrates that Mansfield was capable of constructing complex and subtle narratives: Katherine Mansfield’s writing partakes in a hidden discourse, in which her personal revolt against the family as the model of bourgeois repression and stagnation coincided with a more general assault on those same values by most of the other emerging modernists.(173) However, Kaplan does not bring these observations to a reckoning with “The Garden Party”. She does not address the class issues so apparent in the story, taking rather a feminist approach and focusing on issues of sexuality, bisexuality, the encoded sexual discourse of Mansfield’s writing, and Mansfield’s “lifelong critique of male domination” (190). In this case, a feminist critique is not sufficient response alone, without a working class perspective, for understanding the careful construction of Laura’s class sensibility in this story which is essential to understanding the resistance it offers. In analyzing this story from the perspective of working class Other, I aimed to demonstrate how necessary such a view is in a complete understanding not only of the Mansfield story, but also, by implication, to other literatures as well. Taking this
approach does not negate my belief in the importance of other approaches to working class literature and aesthetics, such as examining literature written by and for the working class (lauter) or demonstrating the presence of a working class aesthetic as distinct from bourgeois or intellectual aesthetics. While my intention is to demonstrate the value and importance of bringing a working class perspective to the critical interpretation and assessment of literary texts, this value goes beyond simply “achieving a more satisfyingly complete account of literature” (Eagleton 209). The aim, rather, as Eagleton has stated the case, is “to discuss literature in ways which will deepen, enrich and extend our lives … [with the hope that] such deepening and enriching entails the transformation of a society divided by class and gender” (210). Works Cited Berkman, Sylvia. Katherine Mansfield: A Critical Study. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951. Best Short Stories, Advanced Level: Short Stories for Teaching Literature and Developing Comprehension, 2nd ed. Providence RI: Jamestown, 1990. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Friis, Anne. Katherine Mansfield: Life and Stories. Einar
Mundsgaard: Copenhagen, 1946. Gagnier, Regenia. “Representations of the Working Classes by Nonworking-Class Writers: Subjectivity and Solidarity”. in Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832-1920. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Gordon, Ian A. Katherine Mansfield. London: Longman & Green, 1954. Hankin, C. A. Katherine Mansfield and Her Confessional Stories. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. Kaplan, Sydney Janet. Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Lauter, Paul. “Working Class Women’s Literature: Introduction to a Study”. in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Edited by Robyn Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. New Brunswick: Rutgers Press, 1991. Mansfield, Katherine. The Garden Party and Other Stories. London: Constable & Co., 1929. Schweickart, Patrocinio. “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading”. in Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies. Edited by Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer. New York: Longman 1994. Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2017 Gale, Cengage Learning Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Loading... Gale Document Number: GALE|H1420122309
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This time please write about The Garden Party by Katherine Man

  • 1. This time please write about The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield The structure is exactly the same as the last time i uploaded it Please check on essay 2 about Marxism and file an essay about marxism 2 that I used to upload. So this essay please do not use another source she only accepted that the source in file i give you Please do not use another source outside Thanks dear For this 5-7-page essay, you need to choose one of the short stories below to determine to what degree the main character(s) is/are driven by an economic motive. As we have learned, Marxist theory claims that “getting and keeping economic power is the motive behind all social and political activities, including education, philosophy, religion, government, the arts, science, technology, the media, and so on” (Tyson 50). For this paper, you will need to research and examine the economic setting in the story. Identify the time and place of the story. What was happening economically in that region at that time, and do the characters in the story seem to reflect these economic conditions?
  • 2. This is the question I would like you to answer, as it is the central idea upon which Marxist literary criticism rests. You must research the economic setting of the story you choose, and you need to cite your sources. Do explain in your essay how the economic struggles relate to the theme you identify in the story. Also, do identify any ironies (verbal, situational, cosmic, or dramatic) that you see as important. Be sure to define the ironies you identify and explain how your example fits the definition. You need 5-7 sources for this paper. The critical theory text for the class counts as one source, as does the original short story or play you are examining. Papers with less sources and/or pages will not be accepted and will be returned to you ungraded. You need to use and cite every source listed on your works cited page. This essay needs to be typed, double-spaced, and follow all correct MLA formats. Reputable academic sources are required for this assignment. The GWC library’s databases are highly recommended. You may use both literary resources and historical sources to help you with this assignment, as long as you cite all sources in your paper and list them correctly on your works cited page. The library also provides a MLA handout that shows you how to cite library research correctly. The work cited page is required and is considered a page of your essay, so it counts as one page and should have a page number on it.
  • 3. Thus, your paper will identify the theme of the story, the economic situation and economic struggles of the characters, and any pertinent ironies. In your conclusion, do weigh in on whether you agree or disagree with Marx’s theory that ALL human activity is motivated by getting or keeping economic power, and do be sure to support your opinion. Choose one story in this case to write an essay “Paul’s Case” by Willa Cather “The Garden-Party” by Katherine Mansfield “The Rules of the Game” by Amy Tan “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker More detail about an essay: For this 5—7 page essay, you need to choose one of the works listed below to examine how the characters’ behavior may be explained in terms of struggling “to get and keep economic power” (Tyson 50). Because the character’s/characters’ setting is a vital part of the story and chosen deliberately by the author to support the story’s main idea, the characters’ financial struggles are crucial to the story’s theme. You also need to consider which ironies are present in the story. Explore this connection in your paper by identifying what you see as a major theme in the story and how the economic struggles of the character/ characters and
  • 4. ironies contribute to and/or support the story’s theme. Source List: You need 5-7 sources for this paper. The short story needs to be cited, and it counts as one source. The critical theory book—if cited—counts as another source. Short story list: Paul’s Case” by Willa Cather The Garden-Party” by Katherine Mansfield “The Rules of the Game” by Amy Tan “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker Sample Approaches and Theses: Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case” demonstrates the seductive and cruel siren song of capitalism when Paul steals and then commits suicide to achieve his version of the American Dream. Both the setting in the hardscrabble world of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, and the ironies in the story contribute to proving the truth behind the Marxist maxim that “getting and keeping economic power is the motive behind all social and political activities” (Tyson 50). Katherine Mansfield illustrates how classism is passed on in upper class families in her 1922 short story “The Garden-Party,” revealing the truth behind the Marxist idea that seemingly innocent social events involve socio-economic struggles. While Mama and Maggie in Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use”
  • 5. refute the Marxist idea that all human activity is motivated by economics and power by continuing their country lifestyle, Dee proves the Marxist maxim true in her educational and social activities. In Amy Tan’s short story “The Rules of the Game,” both Waverly and her mother show how a children’s game of chess was transformed into a way to gain economic power in a Chinese immigrant’s family and society in 1950’s America. Ironically, Waverly becomes a pawn in her mother’s gambit to become the Queen of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Research: Be sure to research the setting, as that will help inform the societal expectations and economic influences of the time and socioeconomic class system in the short story you choose. Setting includes the time and place of the short story, the social classes, gender roles, historical events, manmade objects, and scenes of nature. For example, you may want to look into the following: “Everyday Use”: the Black-Is-Beautiful and Black Power Movements in the U.S. in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the cultural meaning of hair and African dress within the time period for black Americans. You will want to research how being authentically “African” rather than “American” meant higher status within the black community at that time. “Paul’s Case”: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the late 1800’s and early 1900s, the time of “the iron
  • 6. kings”; Andrew Carnegie, Charles M. Schwab, and the like; NYC in the early 20th century; the Waldorf hotel where Paul stayed, Tiffany’s, Carnegie Hall, the spending power of the money he stole, the meaning behind the flowers he wore and their price, etc. “The Garden-Party”: New Zealand in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the class system in New Zealand, symbolism of gardens in English culture and New Zealand culture, the gender roles present in the story (who is working in the home and outside the home?), significance of the young husband/father’s death, the cost of the flowers, foods, hat, and band in the story. “Rules of the Game”: Chinese immigrant experience in the 1950’s, symbolism of chess, wind directions, fish and turtles in the Chinese markets, Tiger Moms in Asian cultures, racism and sexism in Chinese and 1950s American cultures, and the popularity of chess in 1950s America. Where to Begin Your Research: Literature Resource Center library data base online. Short Stories for Students –reference guide in the GWC LRC’s library both online in Literature Resource Center and hard copy text. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide by Lois Tyson (our theory book online) Research on the economy of the time period. Organization:
  • 7. Research the setting and figure out how it supports the theme you chose for the story. Remember, stories may have various themes. As you are looking at this story from a Marxist view, you will want to focus on the socioeconomic classes in the setting. Are the poor and upper classes clashing? Is it the middle class against the upper class, or are class conflicts occurring within one class? How are the boundaries between the classes maintained? Who has the economic power? Is the person/class fighting to keep the economic upper hand in some situation? What social, educational, work, art, and/or political activities are occurring in the story, and how do they support/not support getting and keeping economic power? Tie these questions to the behavior, thoughts, words, and views of the character or characters you examine. Find examples in the text of the short story and quote or paraphrase these examples to support your assertions. Be sure to introduce all quotations one of three ways, and do cite for all quotations and paraphrases. Be sure to tie your analysis to the theme of the story in every single. To include the ironies, you may want to include relevant ironies in each paragraph, as well, or you may wish to have a separate paragraph or two to discuss the pertinent ironies you discovered in the story. Be sure to define each of the ironies you use. You should cite the class handout or any other source you use for the definitions.
  • 8. So for just keep the old essay that you give me and fix it little bit She wants you to make a clear thesis about Identifying the time and place of the story. What was happening economically in that region at that time, and do the characters in the story seem to reflect these economic conditions? This is the question I would like you to answer, as it is the central idea upon which Marxist literary criticism rests and she wants you to complete the essay with introduction, body paragraph and conclusion. For about You must research the economic setting of the story you choose, and you need to cite your sources. Do explain in your essay how the economic struggles relate to the theme you identify in the story. Also, do identify any ironies (verbal, situational, cosmic, or dramatic) that you see as important. Be sure to define the ironies you identify and explain how your example fits the definition. I will screenshot the source she wants me to use for you.
  • 9. 2. 3. 4. 5. Disclaimer: This is a machine generated PDF of selected content from our products. This functionality is provided solely for your convenience and is in no way intended to replace original scanned PDF. Neither Cengage Learning nor its licensors make any representations or warranties with respect to the machine generated PDF. The PDF is automatically generated "AS IS" and "AS AVAILABLE" and are not retained in our systems. CENGAGE LEARNING AND ITS LICENSORS SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ANY AND ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY WARRANTIES FOR AVAILABILITY, ACCURACY, TIMELINESS, COMPLETENESS, NON- INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
  • 10. PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Your use of the machine generated PDF is subject to all use restrictions contained in The Cengage Learning Subscription and License Agreement and/or the Gale Literature Resource Center Terms and Conditions and by using the machine generated PDF functionality you agree to forgo any and all claims against Cengage Learning or its licensors for your use of the machine generated PDF functionality and any output derived therefrom. Irony in 'The Garden Party,' Author: Ben Satterfield Date: Winter 1982 From: Ball State University Forum(Vol. 23, Issue 1) Reprint In: Short Story Criticism(Vol. 23) Document Type: Critical essay Length: 1,383 words Full Text: [In the following essay, Satterfield contends that “irony is the keynote” for understanding “The Garden Party.”] All of the writing on Katherine Mansfield's most anthologized story recognizes or implies that “The Garden-Party” is a fable of initiation. The general interpretation argues that Laura goes from her Edenic world to one in which death exists, and that archetypically she loses her innocence, thereby acquiring knowledge and reaching a point of initiation. Laura has a great discovery, true; but because of her inability to make any kind of statement about it that would serve to clarify its meaning, critics disagree on whether she will go on to learn more about life and death or
  • 11. whether she will retreat into the sanctuary of the garden world. Much of the disagreement can be resolved, I believe, by a close examination of the irony—which has been largely ignored—and the function and effect of that irony upon the events of the story. Also, “The Garden-Party” contains two types of initiation, a fact mostly overlooked, and the initiations are not compatible, as the details of the story make evident. Irony is the keynote. The central character of “The Garden- Party,” Laura Sheridan, is protected from the exigencies of life and is unable to view reality (even death) except through the rose- tinted glasses provided by a delicate and insulated existence. Laura's world is a world of parties and flowers, a pristine world of radiant, bright canna lilies and roses, a precious and exclusive world. Laura's sister, Jose, is early described as a butterfly—and what creature is more delicate than a butterfly? That Jose chooses to sing a song about a weary life, obviously something she is unacquainted with, has to be ironic: in the Sheridan family, weariness and sorrow are merely lyrics to be mocked. Mansfield's exquisite use of imagery is as telling as her irony. For example, the flower imagery throughout the story serves to keep the reader reminded of the delicacy of Laura's world. The flowers are splendid, beautiful, and—what is not stated—short- lived. Laura, too, is beautiful, radiant, flower-like. But even the afternoon is likened to a flower: “And the perfect afternoon slowly ripened, slowly
  • 12. faded, slowly its petals closed.” Laura, her vision attuned to the superficial, can see only the beauty and not the dying of the flower, and she cannot see that, in many ways, she is very much like a flower herself. The symbolism of Laura's hat as well as her name (from laurel, the victory crown) is apparent. Marvin Magalaner adroitly sums up the significance of both: “When the mother thus presents her daughter with her own party hat in typical coronation fashion, she is symbolically transferring to Laura the Sheridan heritage of snobbery, restricted social views, narrowness of vision—the garden party syndrome.” Surely this is the case, although Laura may not be aware of it. Hence here is an initiation that is true and subtle. But the strong irony of this story results from the contrast between the way Laura sees herself and the way the reader is led to see her. Laura has very little—if any—insight, a fact made manifest throughout “The Garden-Party.” Her dealings with the workmen illustrate her lack of awareness: she sees them as “extraordinarily nice,” apparently not realizing that their “niceness” is more than likely due to their roles as subordinates, mere hirelings. Laura does not even seem to realize that what to her is a delightful party is simply toil to the workmen. Self-absorbed and narcissistic, she takes the superficial at face value because both she and her perceptions lack depth. “She felt just like a work-girl” is stingingly ironic because the reader knows that Laura has absolutely no concept of the life of a work-girl, just as she has no idea of what lies behind the friendly veneer of the workmen. For her to
  • 13. imagine that she would “get on much better with men like these” rather than the “silly boys” who come to her parties is an indication of how little general comprehension and self-understanding she possesses. The other obvious contrast in the story is between the gaiety on the top of the hill and the sorrow below. The death of a man intrudes upon Laura's affected sensibilities and she discusses the possibility of canceling the party, but, as we suspected, her conscience is easily assuaged (and by the symbolic hat, a distraction that serves to fix Laura permanently in her world). Nothing, positively nothing, is permitted to spoil the party; even the weather is described as “ideal”—a “perfect day for a garden-party.” In the Sheridan world, suffering and misery cannot take precedence over well-ordered but mundane social functions, and will not be allowed to interfere. Consequently, Laura, with uncommon self- centeredness, blots out the death of a common man until a more convenient time: “I'll remember it again after the party's over, she decided.” But even then, for her to realize that she is actually going to the house of the dead man is difficult because “kisses, voices, tinkling spoons, laughter, the smell of crushed grass were somehow inside her. She had no room for anything else.” Unmistakably she has room for little else than parties, and the closer she comes to
  • 14. the house of the dead man the more she realizes her mistake, for here is a reality she does not want to face: it is so much easier to commiserate from the top of the hill—and then to go on with one's fun. When she actually views the dead man, she can see him only as she sees death, as something remote, far, far away. (In addition, she has no more understanding of why she is there than does the dead man's wife.) Death is so removed from Laura's insular life that it is unreal; it cannot really be experienced, much less coped with, so she sees it as she sees everything else, as something marvelous and beautiful. Just as Laura is unable to pierce the facade of the workmen, she is equally unable to see beyond the face of death, the stark reality of which is transformed into dream, and she sees the dead man as sleeping, happy, content. Any initiation into the mystery of life and death is incomplete, whereas the installation of Laura into the Sheirdan tradition is certain. That Katherine Mansfield could present two types of initiation, one profound and the other shallow, is a tribute to her consummate skill: the fact that the protagonist opts for the shallow in no way detracts from her art but serves to increase the poignancy of her tale and to mark its realism. Laura is not without sensitivity, but her sensitivity is sub- ordinated to the comforts and trappings of the Sheridan way of life. She is young and inexperienced, and she has been shielded from the harsher aspects of existence. Even after facing the reali ty of
  • 15. death, however, she is unable to view it realistically and transforms it into a dream, into something wonderful and happy, something that will fit into the tableau of her resplendent world. The ironic tone has been too clearly established for the reader to take Laura's encounter as profoundly affecting. In this regard, “The Garden-Party” asserts itself as not just another story of the loss of innocence, but an alteration of a mythic pattern. The intimations of mortality are only vaguely perceived, and the story closes on a final note of irony: Laura apparently thinks that she has discovered something new about life, not an awesome truth, but something deep and ineffable, something she attempts to explain to her brother, but cannot. Unlike the emperor Augustus, who would sometimes say to his Senate, “Words fail me, my Lords; nothing I can utter could possibly indicate the depth of my feelings,” Laura seems more confused than moved, and her inability to articulate her feelings to her brother is a result of her failure to understand, her inability to grasp the full significance of what she has witnessed. “No matter. He quite understood.” That is, he understood as much as Laura. They both will in all likelihood remain in the refuge of their bright house on the hill and continue giving expensive, gay parties and toying with the surface of things until the petals of their own lives are closed. Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1996 Gale Research, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning
  • 16. Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Loading... Gale Document Number: GALE|H1420000631 Disclaimer: This is a machine generated PDF of selected content from our products. This functionality is provided solely for your convenience and is in no way intended to replace original scanned PDF. Neither Cengage Learning nor its licensors make any representations or warranties with respect to the machine generated PDF. The PDF is automatically generated "AS IS" and "AS AVAILABLE" and are not retained in our systems. CENGAGE LEARNING AND ITS LICENSORS SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ANY AND ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY WARRANTIES FOR AVAILABILITY, ACCURACY, TIMELINESS, COMPLETENESS, NON- INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Your use of the machine generated PDF is subject to all use restrictions contained in The Cengage Learning Subscription and License Agreement and/or the Gale Literature Resource Center Terms and Conditions and by using the machine generated PDF functionality you agree to forgo any and all claims against Cengage Learning or its licensors for your use of the machine generated PDF functionality and any output derived therefrom.
  • 17. Seeking the self in the garden: class, femininity and nature in To the Lighthouse, "Bliss" and "The Garden Party" Author: Rose Onans Date: Fall 2014 From: Virginia Woolf Miscellany(Issue 86) Publisher: Southern Connecticut State University Document Type: Critical essay Length: 2,811 words In Katherine Mansfield's short stories "Bliss" and "The Garden Party" and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse the garden is a space of attempted self-transformation through which the female protagonists seek to grow beyond the confines of their upper- middle class feminine roles. The garden is one of Western literature's most enduring and potent symbols, contextualizing cultural and literary discourse on knowledge, sexuality and nature (Morris and Sawyer 21). In Mansfield's and Woolf's work, however, as Shelley Saguaro argues, "the gardens themselves are imbued with contingency and transition, rather than represented as simple paradigms of paradise or retreat" (59). Mansfield and Woolf problematize the idea that the garden, as a natural space, offers a means to transcend the barriers of class and gender by highlighting the commodification of this space and the restrictive effects of the traditional equation of femininity with nature. Each of the three texts offers its own perspective on the connection between the garden and female subjugation and emancipation. When read together, therefore, they offer a more complete understanding of this relationship, complicating and expanding on the ideas in the individual texts.
  • 18. The relationship between women and nature is immediately problematized in Woolf's To the Lighthouse through the character of Mrs Ramsay. Mrs Ramsay, as an "archetypal mother" figure (Transue 68) and wife who "did not like to be finer than her husband" (To the Lighthouse [TTL] 45) has been rightly understood as Woolf's fictional image of the "Angel in the House" that she describes in "Professions for Women";. "Sympathetic," "charming," "unselfish," excelling in "the arts of family life" and entirely self-sacrificing, the qualities of the Angel in the House ensure that she "never had a mind or a wish of her own" ("Professions"). These traits, although not quite so one- dimensionally presented in Mrs Ramsay, coalesce with the powerful natural imagery that Woolf utilizes to describe her. Mrs Ramsay "pour[ing] erect into the air a rain of energy [...] looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies were being fused into force, burning and illuminating [...] this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life" (TTL 42-43) draws upon the legacy of Western thought in which the feminine is equated with the natural (Kaplan 55). Yet "boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent"--fertile femininity is thus explicitly tied to the Angel in the House, who spends all her personal resources caring for her family (TTL 44). Maria DiBattista's analysis of Mrs Ramsay as being "in the novel's symbolic topography [...] at the center of a circle of life that encloses a green world of gardens and marriage" sums up what I argue is Woolf's problematization of the equation of women with nature by linking Woolf's view to the Angel in the House through the character of Mrs Ramsay (175).
  • 19. This problem becomes particularly important when considering Mansfield's story "Bliss." Bertha Young, as a young upper- middle class housewife, rails against "idiotic civilisation," which means one has to keep one's body "shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle" (Katherine Mansfield. Selected Stories [KMSS] 111). Specifically uttered in response to Bertha's feeling of "bliss" and desire to "run instead of walk," this image of restriction by "civilisation" speaks of enclosure, objectification and commodification of the body and the subjugation of the desire to express natural emotion. This restriction becomes evident in Bertha's inability to express her thoughts and feelings to herself, her child and her husband, Harry, and most importantly can be seen as borne out in her sexual "coldness" with Harry and ambiguous feelings for her friend, Pearl Fulton (KMSS 122). Chantal Cornut-Gentille D'Arcy's reading of the "rare fiddle" as symbolic of the "political and sexual alienation of women" (244) highlights the artificially restrictive force of society, which is countered by the central symbol of the blooming pear tree in Bertha's garden. Bertha's initial feeling of being "shut up in a case" is at odds with her later interpretation of "the lovely pear tree with its wide open blossoms as a symbol for her own life" (KMSS 115). While the specific implications of this identification with the pear tree remain extensively debated, I see it as symbolic of Bertha's desire to "grow" herself out from the restrictions
  • 20. of society. The garden thus becomes the site of Bertha's attempted personal growth. What this growth entails specifically for Bertha remains a matter for debate, but it places her subconscious desire for freedom to grow and express herself squarely within the natural realm through identification with her garden. As Saguaro highlights, despite "Bliss" being imbued with Biblical imagery and symbology, the garden's meaning is transitory rather than static; it is neither a space of redemption nor fall. The women-nature problem discussed in To the Lighthouse becomes extremely pertinent in relation to Bertha's self- identification with nature through the pear tree, and complicates the possibility of nature as an escape in opposition to artificial social and class constructs. The relevance of this issue to Bertha is important, as she is characterized as a more "modern" woman than Mrs Ramsay. While she is not a Victorian "Angel" per se, Bertha's predicament highlights Woolf's point as to the pervasive and subtle power of this idea of womanhood. The connection between the Angel in the House and the feminine natural ideal elucidated through Mrs Ramsay highlights the subtle inference in "Bliss" that Bertha's desire to be like the pear tree cannot offer a meaningful way out, laden as it is with problematic cultural significance. Even Bertha's implied dichotomy between nature and civilization is troubled in "Bliss." Mansfield exposes the commodified status of the garden, listing it among commodities Bertha and Harry are blessed with: they "don't have to worry about money" so they have "this absolutely satisfactory house and garden" (KMSS 115). Bertha's use of grapes to complement the purple carpet and even her amusement at envisaging one of
  • 21. her dinner guests, Mrs Norman Knight, as a monkey suggests that rather than nature acting as an interruption on the artificial, it serves merely to complement it (112, 116). Her desire to identify with nature as a way out of the "case" of civilization's expectations is thus undercut by this reminder that the garden, and therefore Bertha, is not separate from cultural scripts but is, in fact, integral to them. Bertha too is not so far from being of the status of the "rare fiddle" after all. The commodification of the natural, exposing the garden as an upper-class space, is extended in Mansfield's "The Garden Party." As Angela Smith argues, the second line, "they could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it," reveals that the family is "in the habit of ordering what it wants," (KMSS 237; Smith 141), and from the opening line on, the commodification of the natural is heavily emphasized. Even the description of the roses simply highlights that they exist to serve the family's needs (Smith 141): "you could not help feeling they understand that roses are the only flowers to impress people at garden parties" (KMSS 237). Mansfield thus complicates the possibility of Laura achieving any kind of authentic break from her class in the garden. Less than half Bertha's age, Laura Sheridan is arguably not old enough to feel the full extent of the class constriction with which Bertha struggles. Laura, however, perceives the garden as a space to break from the affectations of her upbringing in order to have a genuine interaction with members of the working class, causing her to abandon her attempt to "copy her mother's voice" and look "severe" and instead feel "just like a work girl" (KMSS 239). Her keen awareness of "these absurd class distinctions," despite her
  • 22. desire to believe that "she didn't feel them. Not a bit," precipitates her reaction to the death of the carter, and her eye-opening experience visiting his family (239). Despite Laura's budding awareness of class sensitivity, Mansfield further erodes the idea that the garden offers a natural space, apart from the decadence of the house, in which to break down class distinctions. This is evident through the contrast between Laura's own garden and the "garden patches" of the "little mean dwellings" of the working class in which "there was nothing but cabbage stalks, sick hens and tomato cans" (KMSS 245). This emphasis on the disparity between the gardens, and Mansfield's use of a polyphonic narrative voice throughout the story (Smith 140), means that the Sheridans' judgmental upper - class mentality informs Laura's belief that she can escape. The pervasiveness of this view that perceives poverty as "disgusting and sordid" continually interrupts Laura's experience, and ultimately highlights that Laura is nothing like a "work girl" (245). Yet Laura's reading of the dead man's face as "content"--"what did garden parties and baskets and lace frocks mean to him? He was far from all those things"--suggests that Laura still seeks to get away from "all those things" of her frivolous life (251). Her previous alignment of the means of this escape with the workmen and the garden, however, is sharply critiqued, not only by the emphasis on the garden as a wealthy space, but also by the reality of the dismal poverty that Laura witnesses when she enters a real working class space. As Smith argues, Mansfield's use of polyphony ensures that the effect of Laura's epiphany remains ambiguous, such as when she struggles to articulate to her brother her new sense of life the narrative voice takes over: "but what life was she couldn't explain. No matter. He quite
  • 23. understood. 'Isn't it, darling?' said Laurie" (251). Laura is "poised on the edge of a greater revelation" that remains inconclusive as "we are taken back to the tone of the opening, with the perception that rites of passage are not easily achieved" (Smith 144). In situating Laura's initial personal conflict with class in the garden Mansfield creates a spatial metaphor for the need for distance from class paradigms to allow for Laura's natural process of self- discovery. Yet the continued insertion of the upper-class voice into the narrative speaks to the fact that even the garden is a commodified and class-designated space, offering an explanation for why this rite of passage remains thwarted. To an extent, Bertha and Laura can be seen as intermediary characters between Mrs Ramsay and Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse. Unlike Mrs Ramsay, who exemplifies the traditional role of women, Bertha and Laura are aware of their class and gender roles and push these boundaries. Yet for both characters the ultimate effect remains ambiguous and under-realized. Lily and Mrs Ramsay, however, emblematize a diverging trajectory for women; while Mrs Ramsay remains static, Lily forges a new path for herself through the strength she gains from her painting, thus achieving the personal independence that evades Mrs Ramsay and Bertha. Her vision at the end of the novel, seen as an instance of a woman "freely choosing to engage in conscious, self defining activity" that is "rare in modernism" (Pease 21) is the culmination of the self-confidence that she develops as a result of her painting. Charles Tansley's criticism "'Women can't paint, women can't write'" characterizes the view
  • 24. of women's endeavours that fall outside of their traditional circle (TTL 54). In the crucial dinner scene at the end of the first chapter, "The Window," Lily initially conceives of herself in natural terms as bending "like corn under a wind" from Tansley's ridicule, conforming in the moment to the passive feminine role of appeasement embodied by Mrs Ramsay (94). Lily only recovers "with a great and rather painful effort"' by remembering "there's my painting; I must move the tree to the middle; that matters--nothing else" (94). Her remembrance that "she too had her work" gives her a foundation from which to define herself, to move beyond her feminine role in conversation with Tansley and deny Mrs Ramsay's wish that she marry (92). In the context of our discussion, situating Lily's act of painting in the garden, which has as its subject Mrs Ramsay reading to her son, James, is highly significant. Painting both the garden and the garden-like Mrs Ramsay, Lily is able to assert control over the image, and thus is able to reduce the Madonna-esque image of Mrs Ramsay and James into "a purple shadow without irreverence" (59). Just as her investment in her "work" allows Lily to remove herself from the feminine destiny of marriage and sexual politics, her act of painting in the garden externalizes her from it. Rather than being identified personally with the natural world like Mrs Ramsay (via reference to her fecundity) or seeking growth and escape through access to it like Laura and Bertha, Lily imposes her vision upon the scene, thus in a parallel act removing herself from what DiBattista pertinently calls the "circle of life that encloses [...] gardens and marriage" (175). While the influence of Mrs Sheridan. Laura's mother, is felt right to the end of "The Garden Party," preventing Laura from fulfilling
  • 25. her journey toward self-definition, the artistic act of reducing the mother and child to a shadow in the final version of the painting parallels Lily's realization that because Mrs Ramsay has died the metaphorical Angel in the House has died with her, so that "we can override her wishes, improve away her limited, old- fashioned ideas" (TTL 190). This process is not as simple as superseding the older generation; Lily must complete a highly complex process of taking control over both the garden and the Angel in the House ideal of womanhood so that it does not take control of her. By externalizing herself from both, she does not entangle herself in the problems associated with identification with the garden. She simultaneously breaks down the class expectations upon herself, not by seeking out the garden as a neutral space to avoid class restrictions, but rather by engaging with and defeating them by finding in the garden the subject and space for meaningful work. For both Mansfield and Woolf, thus, the garden becomes a highly contested space imbued with the effects of the class system. To differing degrees, the texts explore this idea in terms of the problems of the commodification of nature paralleling the commodification of women and the pervasive equation of femininity with nature as a means of restricting women within a "generative cycle" (Kaplan 65). Written at a time when Woolf noted the necessity for women to "kill the Angel in the House" in order to "have a mind of their own," the texts speak to the period of transition in the understanding of the role of women. While I have not suggested that the works discussed here have any relationship with one another beyond that of their subject matter, I have argued that the idea of the garden becoming a space of attempted self-transformation functions at a deep level within
  • 26. the concerns of all three narratives. In advancing Lily as the example of a successful attempt to define the female self through a relationship with the garden I do not promote her as a solution to the problems encountered in Mansfield's stories but suggest that her character highlights the difficulties faced by women turning to nature to try and escape the confines of human class constructs. The garden, thus, provides Mansfield and Woolf with a spatial metaphor for the need to achieve both distance from and engagement with class influence, and by functioning as such in their work provides the means for them to achieve this themselves. Works Cited D'Arcy, Chantal Cornut-Gentille. "Katherine Mansfield's 'Bliss': The Rare Fiddle as Emblem of the Political and Sexual Alienation of Women." Papers on Language and Literature 35.3 (1999): 244-69. DiBattista, Maria. "To the Lighthouse: Virginia Woolf's Winter's Tale." Virginia Woolf: Revaluation and Continuity, a Collection of Essays. Ed. Ralph Freeman. Berkeley: U of California P, 1980. 161-88. Kaplan, Sydney Janet. Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Mansfield, Katherine. Katherine Mansfield. Selected Stories. Ed. D. M. Davin. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Morris, Paul and Deborah Sawyer, eds. A Walk in the Garden: Biblical, Iconographical and Literary Images of Eden. Sheffield:
  • 27. JSOT Press, 1992. Pease, Allison. Modernism, Feminism and the Culture of Boredom. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. Saguaro, Shelley. Garden Plots: The Politics and Poetics of Gardens. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing, 2006. Smith, Angela. Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1999. Transue, Pamela J. Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Style. Albany: State U of New York P, 1986. Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. Camberwell: Penguin Books Australia, 2010. --. "Professions for Women." The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. [email protected], The University of Adelaide, 2014. n. pag. Web. 1 November 2014. <https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w7woolf/ virginia/>. Rose Onans Monash University Onans, Rose Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Southern Connecticut State University http://www.home.southernct.edu/~neverowv1/vwm.html
  • 28. Source Citation Onans, Rose. "Seeking the self in the garden: class, femininity and nature in To the Lighthouse, 'Bliss' and 'The Garden Party'." Virginia Woolf Miscellany, no. 86, 2014, p. 21+. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A418088225/LitRC?u=hunt25841&sid= LitRC&xid=e7c08c64. Accessed 24 Apr. 2021. Gale Document Number: GALE|A418088225 http://www.home.southernct.edu/~neverowv1/vwm.html Disclaimer: This is a machine generated PDF of selected content from our products. This functionality is provided solely for your convenience and is in no way intended to replace original scanned PDF. Neither Cengage Learning nor its licensors make any representations or warranties with respect to the machine generated PDF. The PDF is automatically generated "AS IS" and "AS AVAILABLE" and are not retained in our systems. CENGAGE LEARNING AND ITS LICENSORS SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ANY AND ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY WARRANTIES FOR AVAILABILITY, ACCURACY, TIMELINESS, COMPLETENESS, NON- INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Your use of the machine generated PDF is subject to all use restrictions contained in The Cengage Learning
  • 29. Subscription and License Agreement and/or the Gale Literature Resource Center Terms and Conditions and by using the machine generated PDF functionality you agree to forgo any and all claims against Cengage Learning or its licensors for your use of the machine generated PDF functionality and any output derived therefrom. An overview of 'The Garden Party,' Author: Jennifer Rich Date: From: Gale Online Encyclopedia Publisher: Gale Document Type: Work overview; Critical essay Length: 2,109 words About this Work Title: The Garden Party (Short story) Published: January 01, 1922 Genre: Short story Author: Mansfield, Katherine Occupation: New Zealander short story writer Other Names Used: Beauchamp, Kathleen Mansfield; Murry, Kathleen Beauchamp; Petrovsky, Boris; Stanley, Elizabeth (New Zealander writer); Full Text: [Rich is an instructor of literature, composition, and gender issues at Marymount Manhattan College. In the following essay, she examines ways in which “The Garden Party” uses contrasts between social classes to illustrate how the classes define each other.] Most criticism of Katherine Mansfield's short story “The
  • 30. Garden Party” concentrates on the story as a truncated bildungsroman–a story of the growth and maturity of a young idealistic character. Critics such as Daniel S. Taylor in “Crashing the Garden Party: A Dream, A Wakening,” for example, see Laura's initiation as a passage from the “dream world of her parents and social class to the real world of the Sheridan's neighboring working-class.” As Taylor notes, describing the symbolic significance of the garden party, “The garden party epitomizes the dream world of the Sheridan women, a world whose underlying principle is the editing and rearranging of reality for the comfort and pleasure of its inhabitants. Its war is with the real world, whose central and final truth is death.” Similarly, Clare Hansen and Andrew Gurr, in “The Stories: Sierre and Paris,” discuss Laura's evolution into adulthood as taking place in the context of a gulf between rich and poor–a gulf that is indicated by the Mansfield's oppositional descriptions of the world of the Sheridans and the world of their less fortunate neighbors: Words such as “perfect,” “delicious,” “beautiful,” “splendor,” “radiant,” “exquisite,” “brilliant,” “rapturous,” “charming,” “delightful,” “stunning,” convey the outward beauty of the Sheridan's life... In striking contrast are words describing the working people and Saunders lane: “haggard,” “mean,” “ poverty-stricken,” “revolting,” “disgusting,” “sordid,” “crablike,” “wretched.” Given that “The Garden Party” was written in 1922 at the height of Marxist movements across Europe and Russia– which, among
  • 31. other things, attempted to understand class structure and identity–it is necessary to explore the way in which “The Garden Party” presents a picture of class interdependence. Specifically, “The Garden Party” is interesting to investigate for the way it portrays families like the Sheridans as being dependent for their class - identity on their always nearby working-class neighbors. Thus, rather than conceptualizing the worlds of the Sheridans and the worlds of the Scotts as diametric opposites whose paths seldom cross, we shall explore the way in which “The Garden Party” presents the two worlds as always meeting and clashing–defining one and the other through their continual juxtaposition. “The Garden Party” is structured around the preparations for an early afternoon garden party. The sense of the Sheridans as inhabiting a dream-like world is set out in the very first lines when the narrator comments on the ideal weather conditions for the garden party. “And after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud.” The family, and particularly its female members, seem to derive their life-force from the carefree atmosphere in which they live. In the story's first scene, Meg, one of Laura's sisters, is seen sipping coffee, hair washed, wrapped in a green turban. Jose, another sister, is simply described as a butterfly who always “came down in a silk petticoat and a kimono jacket.” Mansfield, however, does not allow this sense of early morning luxuriance to go uninterrupted. Immediately, those
  • 32. upon whom the Sheridan sisters' luxury depends burst in upon this scene of lazy breakfast-taking. Their entrance is signaled by a break in the narrator's description of the garden and weather: “Breakfast was not yet over before the men came to put up the marquee.” The now down-to-earth tone of this sentence connotes linguistically a clash between the lives of the Sheridan sisters and the men who must come at dawn to put up the marquee for the party. This interruption is further signaled when Laura, the main character who throughout the story attempts to bridge personally these two ever-present worlds, runs out to meet the workmen with breakfast–the signifier of her “Sheridan” life–in hand. Significantly, Laura feels embarrassed still holding the bread and butter when she comes to meet the workmen: “Laura wished now that she had not got the bread-and-butter, but there was nowhere to put it and she couldn't possibly throw it away.” The reason for this awkwardness is precisely that the bread and butter, the piece of Sheridan life which she has taken with her, defines her to the workmen as not one of them but as opposite from them, and upper class. Laura attempts to mediate that duality by playing both roles–taking a big workman-like bite from her slice of refined Sheridan life while thinking of the “absurdity of class distinctions.”
  • 33. While Laura is exulting in her camaraderie with the workmen, one of them catches her attention. He seems somewhat apart from his compatriot–he does not share the general frivolity, and functions to once again remind Laura of their difference. Discussing the placement of the marquee, Laura remarks that there will be a band playing at the party. To this the workman replies, “H'm, going to have a band, are you?” After this remark, Laura notices that this workman “was pale,” and with a “haggard look as his dark eyes scanned the tennis court.” At this very moment, however, of a sense of mutual alienation, the workman picks and smells a sprig of lavender from the garden. Witnessing this, Laura feels their differences evaporate and “wonder(s) at him for caring for things like that–caring for the smell of lavender.” Once again, then, a moment of antimony, of unmediated difference of “two worlds,” is mediated by an action, this time on the part of one of the workmen rather than Laura. This sense of similar class identities is short-lived, however, as the narrative continues with the continued clashing and jarring of the two worlds. In fact, during the rest of the story there is never a moment where Saunders Lane is forgotten. Even at the dreamiest point in the Sheridan world, Saunders Lane is suggested in some way or another. For example, after Laura has met the workmen, she settles down for a moment and listens to the sound of the house. As she listens she finds that the house is an airy delight, “every door seemed open... And the house was alive with soft, quick steps and running voices.” Even this momentary enjoyment of
  • 34. the house's heavenly comfort is interrupted by Saunders Lane. The interruption comes in the form of “a long chuckling absurd sound. It was the heavy piano being moved on its stiff castors.” Although we are told that Meg and Jose are involved in moving the piano, it is the servant Hans's physical labor that Laura undoubtedly overhears. A more humorous (if not satirical) moment of potential mediation between the two worlds of the story is Jose's absurd song with which she tests her voice. Jose has been earlier described as a “butterfly”–a girl of cream-puffs and linen dresses, and of course garden parties. Yet, the song that she sings is decidedly not of this type: “This life is Wee-ary ,/A Tear–A Sigh./A Love that Chan- ges/This life is Wee-ary.” Rather than the expected moment of unity between the Sheridan house and Saunders Lane, the absurd pairing of an emotionally calloused character like Jose with a song of sorrow and desperation serves instead to remind the reader that it is precisely the weariness of others that makes possible Jose's butterfly-like existence. This antithesis of expression and experience is punctuated by Jose's actions at the close of the song, But at the word “goodbye”, and although the piano sounded more desperate than ever, her face broke into a brilliant, dreadfully unsympathetic smile, 'Aren't I in good voice, Mummy?' This mismatch of expression and character is underscored by
  • 35. the fact that this song is preceded by Jose giving orders to the servant, Hans, to rearrange the tables and to sweep the rug. The garden party is itself not fully described in the story. We are only privy to certain snatches of conversation–and these tell us that it has been a success, with Laura the center of much attention because of her black hat. Before the garden party, Laura's mother, Mrs. Sheridan, had distracted Laura from thinking about the dead laborer and her wish to cancel the garden party by enticing her with a black hat. Laura had at first resisted this appeal to her vanity, but once she leaves her mother's bedroom, she catches a glimpse of herself in the hat in her bedroom mirror. What she sees startles her, and serves to obliterate the image of the dead laborer. There, quite by chance, the first thing she saw was this charming girl in the mirror, in her black hat trimmed with gold daisies, and a long velvet black ribbon. Never had she imaged she could look like that.... Just for a moment she had another glimpse of that poor woman and those little children, and the body being carried into the house. But it all seemed so blurred, unreal, like a picture in the newspaper. The hat thus functions at this moment to reinforce more than ever the division between the world of the Sheridans and the world of the Scotts. Suffused with vanity as a result of the hat's charm, Laura forgets the tragedy down the hill, and more than ever desires to continue with the garden party. Even when confronted with her brother, Laurie–the family member with whom she is most emotionally
  • 36. intimate–Laura decides not to tell him of Scott once he has complemented her on her hat. Ironically, the hat–after the garden party–is a catalyst for a moment of understanding/connection between Laura's world and the world of the Scotts. After the party, Laura's mother suggests that Laura take a basket of party scraps down to Scott's widow. At first, Laura questions the appropriateness of this gesture, but is soon convinced. Mrs. Sheridan also insists that Laura “run down just as [she is]”–in party dress and hat. Arriving at Saunders Lane, Laura soon feels awkward because of the way in which she is dressed. This awkwardness, I would argue, signals a moment of insight for Laura into the lives of the workers who live on this lane. She is disturbed because of the brightness of her frock and the extravagance of the famous hat: “how her frock shone! And the big hat with the velvet streamer–if only it was another hat!” Noting the difference between her dress and that of the laborers–tweed capped men and shawled women–Laura realizes the life absent of carefree happiness that the inhabitants of Saunders Lane must endure. A bright frock and an extravagant hat have no home here. Like the bread and butter episode, this piece of Sheridan life reveals to her the almost unsurmountable disjuncture between her life and the lives of these workers. The hat also functions to create another moment of insight for Laura when she is alone with the body of the laborer. When Laura enters the Scott home, she is immediately confronted with the
  • 37. sorrow-ravaged face of the laborer's widow. Although Laura tries to escape as soon as it is possible, the widow's sister insists that she view the now-peaceful body of Mr. Scott. Laura is soon overwhelmed by the peacefulness of the expression on the laborer's face; particularly she is overcome by the remoteness of his appearance. “He was given up to his dream. What did garden- parties and baskets and lace frocks matter to him? He was far from all those things. He was wonderful, beautiful. While they were laughing and while the band was playing, this marvel had come to the lane.” Laura feels that she can not leave Scott without saying something that would indicate the affect that he has had on her – “She gave out a loud, childish sob... 'Forgive my hat,' she said.” Although her plea is undoubtedly comical and absurd, it also carries within it a significant moment of understanding. As we have seen, the hat has heretofore functioned as a prime signifier of the division between the two worlds–earlier, the hat had caused Laura to forget the tragedy just down the hill. By apologizing for her hat, Laura is also apologizing for what it represents–class snobbery, selfishness, and the almost unsurmountable psychological and social division between the world of the laborers and the world of the Sheridans. The hat, then, here facilitates a moment of connection–of class similarity–through its very significance as a symbol of division and antimony. The story concludes with Laura meeting her brother,
  • 38. Laurie, in Saunders Lane. Her demeanor with him indicates that she has been touched by the universality of death and life–both know neither class borders nor garden parties. Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2021 Gale, a Cengage Company Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Rich, Jennifer. "An overview of 'The Garden Party,'." Gale Online Encyclopedia, Gale, 2021. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1420003151/LitRC?u=hunt25841&sid =LitRC&xid=eaf790ac. Accessed 24 Apr. 2021. Gale Document Number: GALE|H1420003151 Disclaimer: This is a machine generated PDF of selected content from our products. This functionality is provided solely for your convenience and is in no way intended to replace original scanned PDF. Neither Cengage Learning nor its licensors make any representations or warranties with respect to the machine generated PDF. The PDF is automatically generated "AS IS" and "AS AVAILABLE" and are not retained in our systems. CENGAGE LEARNING AND ITS LICENSORS SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ANY AND ALL EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY WARRANTIES FOR AVAILABILITY, ACCURACY, TIMELINESS, COMPLETENESS, NON- INFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Your use of the machine generated PDF is subject to
  • 39. all use restrictions contained in The Cengage Learning Subscription and License Agreement and/or the Gale Literature Resource Center Terms and Conditions and by using the machine generated PDF functionality you agree to forgo any and all claims against Cengage Learning or its licensors for your use of the machine generated PDF functionality and any output derived therefrom. The Image of Class in Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’: A Working-Class Critique Author: Maureen Murphy Date: 1998 From: The Image of Class in Literature, Media, and Society: Selected Papers, 1998 Conference, Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, March 12-14, 1998, Colorado Springs, Colorado Publisher: Soc. for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, U of Southern Colorado Reprint In: Short Story Criticism(Vol. 235. ) Document Type: Critical essay Length: 3,931 words Full Text: [(essay date 1998) In the following essay, Murphy contends that “The Garden Party” presents the working class as “Other” in order to naturalize the middle-class perspective. Murphy concludes that rather than learning something meaningful at the end of the story, Laura simply “responds to death the same way she has been taught to respond to the world—to prettify it.”] In “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading,”
  • 40. Patrocinio Schweickart describes the situation of a woman reading a male text in which “woman” is constructed as Other. The example she uses is from Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but the situation, she says, is a common one in which “women are taught to think as men, to identify with a male point of view, and to accept as normal and legitimate a male system of values, one of whose central principle is misogyny” (199). This situation, according to Schweickart, doubles the female reader’s oppression (199). I propose that a similar situation arises from class differences presented in literature in which working class is constructed as Other while a middle class perspective is presented as “universal.” Working class readers are thus taught to think as middle class, to identify with a middle class point of view, and to accept as normal and legitimate a view which often belittles and devalues their own experiences. To illuminate this situation, I will employ a critique modeled on the feminist critique presented in Schwiekart’s article, in which the critic resists the “universal” viewpoint and allows herself instead to identify with Other. The text I have chosen to subject to this critique is Katherine Mansfield’s short story “The Garden Party”, for several reasons. First, this story, written from a bourgeois perspective, overtly constructs the working class as Other; second, my reading of the story differs significantly from other readings; third, my daughter brought this story home from her English class, complaining about the
  • 41. textbook in which it appeared, which she said missed the whole point of the story. I read the story thinking I could help her answer the questions, but as it turned out, I agreed with her. The explanations of the story in the textbook seemed to me to be based on a reading which mistook class distinctions as viewed by a bourgeois and unreliable narrator for actual, real world class difference. In this reading, the story is about the gulf that exists between the rich and the poor (Best) rather than, as it is for me, a story about a young girl learning to take her place in society through the careful construction of class distinctions. In my reading, those distinctions are constructed by an unreliable, middle class narrator and not by the text itself, which in fact represents those distinctions in a manner which interrogates and, ultimately, resists the point-of-view character’s class identity. That to date I have found no critical response to the story which supports this interpretation does not deter me from offering the following as a valid reading. “The Garden Party” is the story of the household of a well -to-do family preparing to give an afternoon garden party. The story is told from the point-of-view of the younger daughter, Laura. The rest of the household consists of Laura’s mother, her brother Laurie, sisters Meg and Jose, and a variety of servants and workers, whom my daughter’s textbook refers to as “simply part of the setting” (Best 38). When workmen come to prepare the house and grounds for the party, the reader observes Laura’s first encounter with the Other: “Four men in their shirt-sleeves stood grouped together
  • 42. on the garden path. They carried staves covered with rolls of canvas, and they had big tool-bags slung on their backs. They were impressive” (69). Laura’s mother has given her the job of directing the workers, who will put up a marquee. From the beginning, Laura is conscious of class distinctions as she “tried to look severe and even a little bit short-sighted as she came up to them” (69). She has not yet fully assimilated those distinctions, however, as she will by the end of the story: “‘Good morning,’ she said, copying her mother’s voice. But that sounded so fearfully affected that she was ashamed, and stammered like a little girl” (69-70). In spite of Laura’s assertion of artistic superiority (Laura “loved having to arrange things; she always felt she could do it so much better than anybody else” (69)), the workmen demonstrate to the reader that they know best. They have their own ideas; though Laura gives directions, the workers make decisions and carry them out on their own: “‘Look here, miss, that’s the place. Against those trees … That’ll do fine’” (71). Must that be the place? It must: “Already the workmen had shouldered their staves and were making for the place” (71). In addition to making and carrying out their own decisions, these workmen refuse to participate in Laura’s constructed differences and
  • 43. conventions: “You see, with a thing like a marquee,” and he turned to Laura in his easy way, “you want to put it somewhere where it’ll give you a bang slap in the eye, if you follow me.” Laura’s upbringing made her wonder for a moment whether it was quite respectful of a workman to talk to her of bangs slap in the eye.(70) To Laura such friendliness and familiarity are evidence of impropriety and ignorance of proper behavior, but to the reader whose allegiance shifts, as mine invariably does, to the workmen, their behavior is familiar and not at all improper; it is Laura’s attitude that becomes that of Other. The men treat her as the child she is, not as if she were superior. These workmen refuse to fit Laura’s preconceptions, and so she forms new distinctions in whi ch the working class become, in a manner Regenia Gagnier asserts is common to middle class culture, “picturesque (nonthreatening) Others” (104): “Why couldn’t she have workmen for friends rather than the silly boys she danced with and who came to Sunday night supper? She would get on much better with men like these … It’s all the fault, she decided … of these absurd class distinctions” (72). Laura’s awareness of class distinctions allows her to question those distinctions, but she is able to do little more than question. The text mocks her response in the next lines, “Just to prove how happy she was, just to show the tall fellow how at home she was, and how she despised stupid conventions, Laura took a big bite of her bread-and-butter …” (72).
  • 44. A similar ineffective response occurs during the course of the day, when news comes that a workman in a nearby cottage has been killed. Laura, sensitive to these new acquaintances she has made, wants to cancel the party. Her sister Jose, who presents an interesting contrast to Laura at this point in the story, disagrees. “Her eyes hardened. She looked at (Laura) just as she used to when they were little and fighting together. ‘You won’t bring a drunken workman back to life by being sentimental,’ she said softly” (82). Laura, just as she used to do when they were children, goes off to tell her mother. But “[t]o Laura’s astonishment” (83), her mother agrees with Jose. Both accuse Laura of being “extravagant” in her feelings for the workers. The depth of Laura’s feelings is revealed when her mother distracts her with a new hat. As she leaves her mother’s room, Laura sees herself in the mirror. “Never before had she imagined she could look like that. Is mother right? she thought. And now she hoped her mother was right … Perhaps it was extravagant” (84)— extravagant not to have a new hat but to expend so much feeling on workers. The ironic use of the term “extravagant” clearly mocks Laura and the world she lives in. It is this authorial voice which is denied to Katherine Mansfield by my daughter’s textbook and to the critical reactions to “A Garden Party”. This distinction, clearly evident when one’s allegiance shifts from narrator to worker, is evident
  • 45. from the opening lines of the story: And after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. … The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine. As for the roses, you could not help feeling they understood that roses are the only flowers that impress people at garden parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing. Hundreds, yes, literally hundreds (of roses) had come out in a single night; the green bushes bowed down as though they had been visited by archangels.(Mansfield 68) My daughter’s textbook describes this scene as “light and heavenly” (Best 36); most critical response sees it as Edenic. Anna Friis claims that “The world that Katherine Mansfield shows us in her stories, glows with beauty. It fills our senses with delight and overpowers us with its loveliness” (174-5). I submit that this delight might depend on whether one views this world from the point of view of an “extravagant” girl, or from the point of view of “the gardener who had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them” (68). As I demonstrate below, the Modernist Mansfield provides both perspectives. Critical response to Mansfield is hampered by critics who tend to view her writing simply as confessional and autobiographical. Sidney Janet Kaplan in Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction states the case: “The question of the relation of life to art, personal experience to completed literary object, becomes especially complicated in the case of a woman writer,
  • 46. for it is at the center of the problematic critical response to women’s writing in general, in that everything a woman writes has usually been assumed to be a function of her autobiographical impulse, either confession or wish fulfillment” (171). Ian A. Gordon, a New Zealand critic, clearly falls into this category of “problematic critical response.” He states, “Katherine Mansfield to a degree almost unparalleled in English fiction put her own experiences into her stories. She wrote of nothing that did not happen to her” (7). “Based so directly on her own experiences, her range is even more restricted than Jane Austen’s,” he claims, with not more than half a dozen themes. One of the themes he allows her is depicting the world of children, which she does magnificently, in Gordon’s judgment, in “The Garden Party” by letting the reader participate in Laura’s experience of the world. Sylvia Berkman also notes autobiographical elements, observing, as do many others, that the garden where Mansfield played often with her brother Leslie, later to die in the war, is the very garden of “The Garden Party”. Though Berkman acknowledges that “Katherine Mansfield rejected the society into which she was born” (11), this knowledge does not affect her reading of the story, which to her is nostalgic for that earlier, innocent time. Berkman’s response is hampered in that she is unwilling to credit Mansfield
  • 47. with the reasoning powers of other writers: Like Joyce, [Mansfield] never recovered from this act of violence [i.e., leaving her home] … [However, she] had not Joyce’s highly trained, dialectical mind; she was not impelled to break away, through will or reason … Her act in leaving Wellington was an act of instinctive assertion. … [Because she was] of a more yielding composition … In time she came to look upon New Zealand as a lost paradise, transmuting her childhood memories into the nostalgic beauty of her finest work.(11) “The Garden Party” is indeed one of her finest works, but this description, it seems to me, is more fitting of Laura than of the author. Confusing the voices of narrator and author is also an issue in the way my daughter’s textbook explains the opening scene: You might think that the description of a nice day is rather overdone. Yet the extravagance has a purpose. “The Garden Party” is a story of contrasts, as you have seen, and the author is preparing you for the shock of the scene that comes later: The lane began, smoky and dark. … A low hum came from the mean little cottages. In some of them there was a flicker of light, and a shadow, crab-like, moved across the window. …(36) … even the people are dark and their shadows are crab-like—as if it were the underworld. One setting conveys a feeling of absolute joy; the other projects abject misery. Two settings and two contrasting situations develop one theme—the huge gulf, both physical and psychological, between the rich and poor in society. This scene occurs after the party is over when Laura, in
  • 48. acknowledgment of her concern for the workers, is sent to the bottom of the lane in a kind of ritual, carrying a basket of cakes, fancy sandwiches, and cream puffs for the bereaved family. According to Regenia Gagnier, “In middle class fiction, when a crisis of irreconcilability occurs between the two classes (e.g. “masters and men’ find their interests irreconcilable) … it is redirected from class conflict to romantic love and Christian charity” (113). Indeed, Laura’s questioning of class distinctions dissipates in this final scene. As Laura carries her basket of goodies to the bottom of the lane, for the first time in the story, her imagination takes her into a frightening and alien world, the world, for her, of Other. I submit, however, that there is nothing presented by the text that shows this place as the dark “underworld” (Best 36), except through the narrator and her own class-bound reactions. Laura is frightened, but the text presents nothing which is frightening; it is Laura herself and her “upbringing” which create the fear: “A dark knot of people stood outside … Oh, to be away from this! She actually said, ‘Help me, God,’ as she walked up the tiny path and knocked … to her horror the woman answered, ‘Walk in, please, miss’” (90). If the reader allows his/her perspective to shift from narrator to Other, this “underworld” seems not very dark or scary at all —in fact it is at least as normal as, if not more than, the garden party itself. When Laura enters that gathering at the foot of the lane, she is treated like any other. As a participant in many such gatherings, I see her gift of food not as charity as she feared, but as the contribution of any other member of the community. She is
  • 49. invited into their grief. This is all so alien to her, but to one to whom it is not alien, it is Laura who is constructing that Otherness. Whereas earlier her words were “exquisite,” “delicious,” “radiant,” “rapturous,” “charming,” now the words are “haggard,” “mean,” “sordid,” “crab-like,” “wretched.” These are Laura’s words, and this reader trusts her words in this scene no more than earlier in her exaggerated and imaginative descriptions. Laura is accepted into this gathering and constructs her own discomfort the same way she has imaginatively constructed the beauty of her own world. After Laura enters the little cottage at the end of the lane, she comes face to face with a horror that does not exist in her prior, Edenic world. She is ushered in to the room displaying the dead workman’s body. This is what she sees: … so remote, so peaceful. He was dreaming … He was wonderful, beautiful. While they were laughing and while the band was playing, this marvel had come to the lane. Happy … happy … All is well, said that sleeping face. This is just as it should be. I am content.(Mansfield 92) The usual interpretation of this climactic scene is that Laura experiences a genuine epiphany and comes to a new understanding of the ways in which beauty and ugliness can be reconciled (Hankin 240-1). Certainly Laura’s response to the dead man separates her from the people in the cottage, from the wife whose “face, puffed up, red, with swollen eyes and swollen lips, looked terrible” (91).
  • 50. However, her response unites her with her sister Jose by paralleling an earlier scene in the story in which Jose sings a mournful song, foreshadowing the later events in the cottage. Earlier Jose has … clasped her hands. She looked mournfully and enigmatically at her mother and Laura as they came in. “This Life is Wee-ary, A Tear—a Sigh. A Love that Chan-ges, This Life is Wee-ary, A Tear—a Sigh. A Love that Chan-ges, And then … Goodbye!” But at the word “Good-bye,” and although the piano sounded more desperate than ever, [Jose’s] face broke into a brilliant, dreadfully unsympathetic smile. “Aren’t I in good voice, mummy?” she beamed.(76-7) Although earlier Laura had been horrified by Jose’s uncaring response, in the final scene we hear her false wail and see that Laura too is unable or unwilling to acknowledge suffering and pain. She denies even her own experience of sadness and death.
  • 51. “I say, you’re not crying, are you?” asked her brother. Laura shook her head. She was. Laurie put his arm round her shoulder. “Don’t cry,” he said in his warm, loving voice. “Was it awful?” “No,” sobbed Laura. “It was simply marvelous.”(92-3) Far from coming to a reconciliation of beauty and death, Laura responds to death the same way she has been taught to respond to the world—to prettify it. At the end of the lane, where the Sheridan children were forbidden to go when they were younger “because of the revolting language and of what they might catch” (82), the reader comprehends the completeness of Laura’s initiation into her class role. C. A. Hankin gives the most complete interpretation of “The Garden Party”, in which she notes, “The fact that the rich can avoid (or attempt to avoid) the unpleasant realities of human existence, even summon up beauty and elegance at will, is conveyed in the very first paragraph” (237). Hankin is aware of all the class dimensions of the story, pointing out “Laura’s inner division” as she is torn between two world, the artificially beautiful world of her class and the natural world of the working class. However, Hankin interprets the final scene in the story no differently from other critics, that Laura experiences an epiphany which reconciles “ugliness and
  • 52. death” with “a personal vision of beauty and hope” (241), although the interpretation leaves her uncomfortable: “we are left with the uneasy feeling that she has let her character off too lightly” (241). “There is a sense,” Hankin says, “in which Katherine Mansfield has granted us, too, a reprieve; has assuaged both our guilt about social inequalities and our haunting anxiety about death” (241). The problem with these interpretations is that they participate too fully in Laura’s perspective, accepting the class distinctions Laura makes as “real,” rather than constructed and conveyed by an unreliable narrator. So too do these interpretations allow readers to participate in a world-view that avoids, as does Laura, acknowledging the unpleasantries of living. “The Garden Party” is the last story Mansfield wrote before her early death from a prolonged struggle with tuberculosis. This story is frequently cited as evidence of her acceptance of and reconciliation with both the death of her brother in WWI and with her own death (Berkman, Hankin). That the story, rather, presents a critique of way of living that did not prepare her for either death is a possibility readers seem unprepared or unwilling to acknowledge. Indeed, the conventional interpretation allows readers, with no assistance from Mansfield, to, as Hankin stated (above), assuage “both our guilt about social inequities and our haunting anxiety about death.” Sidney Janet Kaplan has demonstrated, from letters and journals, that Mansfield was suspicious of epiphanies, as she
  • 53. was suspicious of the personal in fiction, believing, as other modernist writers, that art needed to move from personal immediacy. (180-2) She points out that Mansfield, in other stories, parodied epiphanic revelation: “Although ‘the moment’ contains many of the features of epiphanic revelation, Mansfield makes sure that we do not mistake it for genuine enlightenment” (186). Kaplan also demonstrates that Mansfield was capable of constructing complex and subtle narratives: Katherine Mansfield’s writing partakes in a hidden discourse, in which her personal revolt against the family as the model of bourgeois repression and stagnation coincided with a more general assault on those same values by most of the other emerging modernists.(173) However, Kaplan does not bring these observations to a reckoning with “The Garden Party”. She does not address the class issues so apparent in the story, taking rather a feminist approach and focusing on issues of sexuality, bisexuality, the encoded sexual discourse of Mansfield’s writing, and Mansfield’s “lifelong critique of male domination” (190). In this case, a feminist critique is not sufficient response alone, without a working class perspective, for understanding the careful construction of Laura’s class sensibility in this story which is essential to understanding the resistance it offers. In analyzing this story from the perspective of working class Other, I aimed to demonstrate how necessary such a view is in a complete understanding not only of the Mansfield story, but also, by implication, to other literatures as well. Taking this
  • 54. approach does not negate my belief in the importance of other approaches to working class literature and aesthetics, such as examining literature written by and for the working class (lauter) or demonstrating the presence of a working class aesthetic as distinct from bourgeois or intellectual aesthetics. While my intention is to demonstrate the value and importance of bringing a working class perspective to the critical interpretation and assessment of literary texts, this value goes beyond simply “achieving a more satisfyingly complete account of literature” (Eagleton 209). The aim, rather, as Eagleton has stated the case, is “to discuss literature in ways which will deepen, enrich and extend our lives … [with the hope that] such deepening and enriching entails the transformation of a society divided by class and gender” (210). Works Cited Berkman, Sylvia. Katherine Mansfield: A Critical Study. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951. Best Short Stories, Advanced Level: Short Stories for Teaching Literature and Developing Comprehension, 2nd ed. Providence RI: Jamestown, 1990. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Friis, Anne. Katherine Mansfield: Life and Stories. Einar
  • 55. Mundsgaard: Copenhagen, 1946. Gagnier, Regenia. “Representations of the Working Classes by Nonworking-Class Writers: Subjectivity and Solidarity”. in Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832-1920. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Gordon, Ian A. Katherine Mansfield. London: Longman & Green, 1954. Hankin, C. A. Katherine Mansfield and Her Confessional Stories. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. Kaplan, Sydney Janet. Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Lauter, Paul. “Working Class Women’s Literature: Introduction to a Study”. in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Edited by Robyn Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. New Brunswick: Rutgers Press, 1991. Mansfield, Katherine. The Garden Party and Other Stories. London: Constable & Co., 1929. Schweickart, Patrocinio. “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading”. in Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies. Edited by Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer. New York: Longman 1994. Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2017 Gale, Cengage Learning Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Loading... Gale Document Number: GALE|H1420122309