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The Garden Party | Introduction

Widely anthologized, "The Garden Party" is considered Katherine Mansfield's finest piece of short fiction. Such modernist authors as Virginia Woolf were profoundly influenced by Mansfield's stream-of-consciousness and symbolic narrative style. ''The Garden Party'' is a remarkably rich and innovative work that incorporates Mansfield's defining themes: New Zealand, childhood, adulthood, social class, class conflict, innocence, and experience.

Structured around an early afternoon garden party in New Zealand, "The Garden Party" has clear connections to Mansfield's own childhood and adolescence in New Zealand. The main character of the story, Laura, is an idealistic young girl who wishes to cancel the planned afternoon gathering when she learns of the death of a working-class laborer who lives down the hill from her parents' home. The story concerns Laura's alternating moments of resistance and conformity to her mother's idea of class relations. Like Laura, Mansfield was the daughter of a well-to-do businessman—Harold Beauchamp—and his wife, Annie Burnell Dyer Beauchamp. Like the Sheridans in "The Garden Party," the Beauchamps lived luxuriously, in grand houses in and around Wellington, New Zealand.

"The Garden Party" was first published in 1922 in a collection entitled The Garden Party and Other Stories and immediately became a classic example of the short story form. In an essay published in 1957, Warren S. Walker wrote, "The most frequently anthologized of Katherine Mansfield's works, 'The Garden Party' has long enjoyed a reputation for near-perfection in the art of the short story." In her time, Mansfield was seen as one of the prime innovators of the short story form. After Mansfield's death in 1923, Virginia Woolf would remark in her diary, "I was jealous of her writing—the only writing I have ever been jealous of." Even though it has enjoyed a fine reputation, critics and readers alike have puzzled over what they see as an unsatisfactory ending—an ending that, as Warren Walker remarks, "leaves readers with a feeling of dissatisfaction, a vague sense that the story somehow does not realize its potential."

The Garden Party Summary

Katherine Mansfield's short story "The Garden Party" opens with frantic preparations being made for an afternoon garden party. The main character, Laura, is an idealistic and sensitive young girl. She is surrounded by her more conventional family: her sister, Jose, who, as the narrator tells us, "loved giving orders to servants"; her mother, Mrs. Sheridan, a shallow old woman whose world consists of having enough canna lilies; her father, a businessman; and her brother, Laurie, to whom she feels most similar in feeling and ideals. As many critics have remarked, Mansfield's prose depicts an almost dreamlike world.

This atmosphere is compromised for Laura when she hears of the death of one of the laborers who lives in the cottages down the hill from her house. Struck by the inappropriateness of throwing a garden party when a neighbor has been killed, Laura immediately suggests that they cancel the party. The rest of the story is structured around Laura's reconciliation of her concern for the dead laborer and her family's reactions to his demise. Laura attempts to convince Jose of the necessity of canceling the party. Jose's response is indicative of the family's overall view of the impoverished laborers. She chastises Laura for her desire to cancel the party, saying, ‘‘You won't bring a drunken workman back to life by being sentimental.’’ The narrator's later description of the cottages reveals the family's general hostility toward their neighbors.

After Jose's rebuff, Laura attempts to convince her mother of the need to cancel the garden party. Laura's relationship with her mother is a significant aspect of "The Garden Party." Earlier, in greeting the workmen who were to put up the marquee, Laura had tried to mimic... » Complete The Garden Party Summary