[In the following essay, Bell provides a detailed comparison of Katherine Mansfield's “The Garden Party” and Porter's “The Grave.”]

From certain points of view “The Garden Party” and “The Grave” are so alike as to be all too easily confused. Even their authors can be mistaken for each other. Katherine Mansfield and Katherine Anne Porter, besides having similar names, led circumstantially similar lives. Their careers overlapped in time, although Mansfield died young; they shared relatively privileged backgrounds; they came from outlands to the centers of culture after breaking with their families; they had unstable relationships with men; they traveled widely; they gave steady outputs of fiction but received unsteady inputs of acclaim. Mansfield was British, Porter, American; yet they can frequently be found mentioned together, as if they were literary sisters or cousins. Porter undoubtedly furthered that opinion by her admiration for Mansfield's talent.¹ Still, I am not aware that a detailed comparison has been made between any two stories by these writers, and have found none between two stories that are among their works most often discussed as individuals: “The Garden Party” and “The Grave.”² Indeed, no work by either author has been accorded much attention along the particular thematic lines that “The Garden Party” and “The Grave” seem to me to invite so especially.

Briefly summarized, “The Garden Party” is about the experiences of a young girl, Laura, on the day her family is giving a garden party. During the preparations, she learns that an accident has just happened in which a young man who lived in a lane for poor working people at the bottom of the hill from her “big house” has been killed. She wants to stop the party out of sympathy, but her mother and sister persuade her that she's “being absurd.”³ The party itself takes up only a few lines of the story. The climax comes after the party, when Laura's mother suggests she take a basket of leftovers and some flowers down the hill to the dead man's family. Laura does so, is invited into the cottage to view the body, feels at first acutely uncomfortable in the poor surroundings, then strangely comforted by the peaceful look on the dead man's face, and leaves crying. At the end, she tries to explain to her brother that she has learned something important about life, but cannot find the words.

“The Grave” is a “framed” story, actually a memory about her childhood as experienced vividly by an adult woman, Miranda, during a trip to a marketplace in a strange city. She remembers how she and her brother Paul went one day to play in some abandoned graves at their family cemetery and found there an engraved wedding ring and a coffin ornament, a silver dove, which they kept as treasures. On the way home, Paul shot a rabbit, and, skinning the carcass, the children discovered it was pregnant. Both were moved and troubled by the sight of the unborn rabbits, and an understanding about life began to grow in Miranda, but Paul swore her to secrecy, and she did not reach a full emotional integration of the day's events until her memory, twenty years later.

Both of these stories appeared at about the same time: “The Garden Party” in 1922 and “The Grave” in 1935. Both are less than 5000 words and seem brilliantly simple, condensed. Both have young female protagonists of about the same ages and the same sensitivities, (in both cases, an autobiographical character), and in both stories, this main character is paired with an older brother who plays a supportive role. Both draw on the Christian myth of the Fall. The main plot event matches in the stories: it is the experience of a death, a death that is relatively anonymous and that happens in otherwise undisturbing, one might say “innocent,” circumstances. Correspondingly, the themes match. Both stories express a recognition of “the meaning of life”; both of the protagonists grow up.⁴

Despite their extensive similarities, however, the stories leave the reader with strikingly different feelings and contain different messages about the meaning of life. The key to these differences lies in the different senses of nature the two stories convey—with nature to be understood most concretely as the natural environment; more generally as the natural world, or the opposite of human society; and most abstractly as the forces beyond human control that underlie all of organic life.

“And after all the weather was ideal” (59). The first sentence of “The Garden Party” establishes a placid natural environment which, the reader soon comes to see, is also domesticated. The lawns are mowed, the flowers well-tended. It almost seems too perfect, this setting, as if the natural world were unnatural, and indeed the imagery seems at the least anthropomorphic: at the most sacramental. The rosebushes are said “to [bow] down as though they had been visited by archangels” (59); the karaka trees are imagined proudly to “lift their leaves and fruits to the sun in a kind of splendour” (62); and the most dominant forms of nature in the story are canna-lilies, associated more with greenhouses and altars than with the great outdoors.⁵

While the first pages of “The Garden Party” are occupied with the natural setting, they are the only ones. Just as workmen bring a marquee to hide the karaka trees, human beings, along with their shelter, dress and food, dominate the scene as the story proceeds. Laura at one point sees a workman smelling a sprig of lavender and respects him for that, but for the most part the natural surroundings are of limited importance.

Contrasting with the controlled and limited appearance of the natural environment in “The Garden Party” is that in “The Grave.” The heat is burning on the day that Miranda and Paul go out to play, and the garden where the reader sees the two—also the family cemetery—is wild. It is “neglected,” its rose bushes “tangled,” its grass “uncropped.”⁶ The children are unkempt themselves, and plainly more used to living outdoors than in. They are compared with animals (363).⁷ Then, the death on which the story centers is that of an animal. The skinning and gutting of the rabbit are given in precise detail. At other points in the story, too, material aspects of nature become important and are realistically described. Overall, the natural surroundings dominate setting and plot more consistently in “The Grave” than in “The Garden Party”; they are less stylized; and they are more extreme.

Nature in the sense of the natural world as opposed to human society is also presented differently by the two stories. Garden parties are social events. In the Mansfield story, society predominates over nature. Its description of social relationships starts with those in the large, unified, upperclass family, moves outwards to enclose the family's servants, next surrounds the family's guests, and finally extends to the working-class people living at the bottom of the hill. All of these groups are well-rooted in their place and in society. This is to say not that society is harmonious, but only that the social world is where the action is. Thematically, social class becomes an important issue,⁸ and the importance of society is represented by, among other methods, frequent and sensitive dialogue. At the story's end, the feeling of social cohesion is underlined by the closeness between brother and sister, whose names are analogues.

In “The Grave,” the natural world dominates. Its title suggests as much, for death is one of the main forces of nature. The story scarcely even shows society. The family is the only social unit that figures importantly, but it is isolated. For instance, the extended family is rootless, as the opening paragraph establishes.

The grandfather, dead for more than thirty years, had been twice disturbed in his long repose by the constancy and possessiveness of his widow. She removed his bones first to Louisiana and then to Texas as if she had set out to find her own burial place, knowing well she would never return to the places she had left. In Texas she set up a small cemetery in a corner of her first farm, and as the family connection grew, and oddments of relations came over from Kentucky to settle, it contained at last about twenty graves. After the grandmother's death, part of her land was to be sold for the benefit of certain of her children, and the cemetery happened to lie in the part set aside for sale. It was necessary to take up the bodies and bury them again in the family plot in the big new public cemetery, where the grandmother had been buried.

(362)

Also, the nuclear family in the story is fragmented because it is motherless and set apart from the local community: the children's father is relatively poor and seems scandalous to his neighbors and gossipy crones (365). At the end of the story the family even has disappeared, for Miranda is all alone in a strange city. With one or two exceptions, no social issues are brought up by the story, and although Miranda is said to have a “powerful social sense” (365), it gets nowhere near the exercise that Laura's does.⁹ The thematic absence of society in “The Grave” is mirrored formally by the story's having very little dialogue. After all, the operative characters number only two. The relatively empty social stage of “The Grave” forces the reader to become more aware of the natural world by contrast.

Nature in the sense of forces underlying life appears severally in both stories, and may be analyzed to show the deepest meanings, the deepest differences. For a start, let us take a relatively simple example of nature in this sense, namely sex. “The Garden Party” does not emphasize the raw power of sex. The paragraphs above illustrating how Mansfield depicts nature perhaps have already said as much. Part of Laura's experience in the story is her growing awareness of her sexuality, but that takes polite forms. For instance, she, like all the males and females in the story, follows gender stereotypes important to society. Males earn money, whether commuting to the city, carrying heavy loads, or driving carts, while females uphold social order, whether giving garden parties, cooking, or presiding at wakes. One way of interpreting Laura's day is to say it involves her growing ability to recognize and accept the responsibilities of the female role. For another instance, the main representative of Laura's emergent sexuality is her new hat: looking at it, the other characters and Laura herself remark on how pretty its wearer has become, and the message gets across without drawing attention downward to the lower areas of the body that are really at stake.¹⁰ If so in “The Garden Party,” sex is secondary and social.

In “The Grave,” on the other hand, sex is primary and natural. The wedding ring is the first hint. Of course, weddings in general can be as social as garden parties or hats, but the wedding ring Miranda and Paul find is connected directly to nature. On one level, Miranda's reactions to the ring are rather characteristic of Laura—“she wanted to go back to the farmhouse, take a good cold bath, dust herself with plenty [of her sister's] violet talcum powder, … put on the thinnest, most becoming dress she owned, with a big sash, and sit in a wicker chair under the trees” (365): these are inspired by her attention to the decorativeness of the ring and to its being made of gold. At a deeper level, the one tapped by the flashback, however, the ring establishes an entirely different context for Miranda's sexuality than Laura's hat does for hers. It comes out of a wild, natural setting and is engraved with “intricate flowers and leaves” (363). Flowers and leaves are age-old signs of fertility; they connote the physical coupling decreed by nature more than the legal, moral or spiritual vows decreed by society.

Still, the most important and primitive emphasis on sex comes through Miranda and Paul's discovery of the unborn rabbits, which are symbols of fertility.¹¹ Reproduction is here seen as carnally as possible, and its strong impact is conveyed not only in Miranda's agitation on the spot, but in the overall structure of the story, which parallels the Freudian pattern of repression and recall, a process wholly associated with primitive sexual material. Miranda's thoughts at the moment she sees the babies, moreover, are in the context of a situation where the social sex roles so prominent for Laura have been explicitly suspended, since Miranda dresses and acts like a boy.¹² The sugar-plums of sash and social stereotype disappear. It is hard, almost savage, for Miranda to see that she is, will be like the pregnant rabbit. That sex belongs more to the world of nature than to society is made explicit in the last scene, where the candy rabbits triggering Miranda's memory are connected with “raw flesh and wilting flowers” (367).

The subject of sex opens into the further meanings of nature in these two stories and a final understanding of what each seems to express as “the meaning of life.” Both are the same in showing that the meaning of life is bound up with the meaning of death: the point is obvious, but great literature often brings the obvious home, and the stories show with force and poignancy that these two most basic natural conditions are connected inseparably. “The Garden Party” and “The Grave” differ, however, in their versions of what exactly the connection is.

“The Garden Party” shows the connection to be paradoxical: it is a juxtaposition that is a juncture. When Laura goes down the hill she sees death quietly, modestly, even beautifully co-existing with life and at the same time interrupting life, just as the lower-class characters in the story quietly, modestly, even peacefully co-exist with the gentry on the hill, at the same time challenging their privilege. The “justice” of death in life or of upper-class dominance over the poor is not particularly at issue. Stressed instead is the surprising fact of the situation. One well-known expression of the puzzle appears in a letter Katherine Mansfield wrote to a friend:

… that is what I tried to convey in “The Garden Party”. The diversity of life and how we try to fit-in everything. Death included. That is bewildering for a person of Laura's age. She feels things ought to happen differently. First one and then another. But life isn't like that. We haven't the ordering of it. Laura says, ‘But all these things must not happen at once.’ And Life answers, ‘Why not? How are they divided from each other?’ And they do all happen, it is inevitable. And it seems to me there is beauty in that inevitability.¹³

Life/Death. The life-death connection in “The Garden Party” has a static and symmetrical yet vulnerable quality much like that between marriage partners or the opposite poles of a magnetic field. Such is the feeling of unstable pairedness at the root of nature for which “The Garden Party” finds words, even though Laura does not.

“The Grave” presents a view of life and death that may at first appear to be like the one in “The Garden Party,” but is not. In “The Grave,” the connection between life and death is dynamic. Instead of life and death being ever-present with each other, one becomes the other: the two are separate phases of the same process. Life is death: nature is not paradoxical but unified.

Consider what Laura and Miranda learn from what they see. Laura learns the necessity of accepting death in life, accepts its paradoxical sense. The non-paradoxical parts of her life, functions within society, seem all the more significant by comparison. Miranda learns the necessity of playing her part in the life-death cycle and, for her, natural functions become all the more significant. There is a feeling of ceremony in “The Garden Party,” a feeling of biology in “The Grave.”

Certainly, the tone of “The Grave” reflects more suffering. An interesting confirmation about the way the two stories treat nature may be found in the extent to which each employs Christian symbolism. Both rely on the Garden of Eden parallel to help convey their female characters' movement from innocence to knowledge. “The Garden Party” establishes this metaphor in its title and its early sacramental imagery, already quoted, not to mention its plot, while “The Grave” establishes it less directly in the title but similarly through initial descriptions of the scene and also its plot. “The Grave,” however, carries the symbolism much farther. The theme of sexuality, for instance, follows the Christian track in “The Grave” but not in “The Garden Party.” Also, the silver dove Miranda and Paul find is a Christian symbol and assumes a great deal of importance at the end. Detailed interpretations of Christian meaning in “The Grave” have already appeared, however, and need not be repeated here.¹⁴ The relevance to this essay of Porter's greater attention to the Christian message is simply that Christianity is consistent with the view of nature presented in “The Grave” but inconsistent with that presented in “The Garden Party.” The Christian message is nothing if not dynamic: death redeems life; corruption and sin are the tragic necessities of life's general immortality. The Christian message is violent, too, like the wasteful lust and carnage of “The Grave,” like the wasteful lust and carnage of nature. By contrast, “The Garden Party,” with its climax in the peaceful expression of the young man lying dead, counters nature's power, seeming to speak for a religion of contemplation.¹⁵

So striking and revealing are the differences between “The Garden Party” and “The Grave” in terms of their views of nature that it is tempting to conclude this essay along the lines of the standard comparative theory on the subject. Briefly, the conventional wisdom about differences in American and British literature regarding nature starts out observing that American writers spend a great deal of time describing or thinking about nature, that they tend to display or consider it in extreme forms, and that they deem it more important than society. Then, the typical American identity is seen as formed against a natural backdrop, and a typical story line for American literature is said to be the retreat to nature for purification or enlightenment. (Sometimes this retreat is more of an assault, as D. H. Lawrence argued in Studies in Classic American Literature.) These ideas have been the subjects of books and articles too numerous and familiar to list here, but two comments out of a multitude may be regarded as summary.

… the American, or at least the American artist, cherishes in his inner-most being the impulse to reject completely the gospel of civilization, in order to guard with resolution the savagery of his heart.¹⁶

The individual in America has usually taken his start outside society; and the action to be imitated may just as well be his strenuous efforts to stay outside as his tactics for getting inside; and if he does get inside, it makes a difference whether he is walking into a trap or discovering: the setting in which to realize his own freedom.¹⁷

The reason theory gives for these features of American literature is the literal or figurative lay of the land in America. The British sense of nature, by inference, is regarded roughly as the opposite of the American.

Certainly, what has been shown here about “The Garden Party” and “The Grave” is that they support all the comparative theory's particulars. They are its ideal examples—so ideal that they could be taught as a mini-introduction to nature in British and American literature. That conclusion alone, however, could seem a tautology. More interesting than the two stories' agreement with the theory is the captivating fact that their relevance to the theory hardly comes clear at all until they are paired. A “twin study” in literary criticism, then, may be as revealing as it has proved to be in psychology.

Notes

1. Katherine Ann Porter, “The Art of Katherine Mansfield,” in The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Ann Porter (NY: Delacorte, 1970) 47–52.

2. Cf. Cleanth Brooks's early assessment. “If I had to choose a particular story of Katherine Anne Porter's to illustrate her genius as a writer—the choice is not an easy one—I think I should choose “The Grave.” (“On ‘The Grave,’” Yale Review, 55 [December 1965]: 275–79).

   Re “The Garden Party,” it is widely anthologized, and a Mansfield bibliography shows the story comes second (along with “Bliss”) after “The Fly” in claiming critics attention. (Jeffrey Meyers, “Katherine Mansfield: A Bibliography of International Criticism, 1921–1977,” Bulletin of Bibliography and Magazine Notes, 34 [April-June 1977]: 53–67).

3. Katherine Mansfield, The Garden Party, Modern Library ed. (NY: Knopf, 1922) 71–74. All subsequent references to the story will be to this edition, and page numbers will be given in the text.

4. Whatever the statements on the foregoing list that concern interpretation, they simply represent my summary of universally accepted critical opinion about each of the stories separately.

5. Some critics have found myth symbolism in the story linking Laura with Proserpine, a goddess of nature. (Anders Iversen, “A Reading of Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Garden Party,’” Orbis Litterarum, 23 [1968]: 5–34: and Adam J. Sorkin, “Katherine Mansfield's ‘The Garden Party’: Style and Social Occasion,” Modern Fiction Studies, 24 [Autumn 1978]: 439–55.) My interpretation takes the descriptions of nature less naturalistically, as should be evident; in any case, myth critics mention the Proserpine connection not so much in the context of nature as in the context of initiation.

6. Katherine Anne Porter, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (NY: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965) 362. All subsequent references to the story will be to this edition, and page numbers will be given in the text.

7. Cf. Sister M. Joselyn, O.S.B. “Animal Imagery in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction,” in Bernice Slote, ed. Myth and Symbol (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1963) 101–115.

8. Articles focusing on this issue particularly are Warren S. Walker, “The Unresolved Conflict in ‘The Garden Party,’” Modern Fiction Studies, 3 (Winter 1957–58): 354–58: Donald Taylor and Daniel Weiss, “Crashing the Garden Party,” Modern Fiction Studies, 4 (Winter 1958–59): 361–64.

9. According to one interpretation, the Miranda stories, of which “The Grave” is one, describe four stages traversed by Miranda in her life, during which she finds herself outside society and learns to accept that position. (S. H. Poss, “Variations on a Theme in Four Short Stories of Katherine Anne Porter,” Twentieth Century Literature, 4 [April-July 1958]: 21–29).

10. A more detailed treatment of what the hat signifies may be found in Robert M. Davis, “The Unity of ‘The Garden Party,’” Studies in Short Fiction, 2

11. Dale Kramer, “Notes on Lyricism and Symbols in ‘The Grave,’” Studies in Short Fiction, 2 (Summer 1965): 331–36.

12. Reinforcement of this point comes from Jane Flanders, “Katherine Anne Porter and the Ordeal of Southern Womanhood,” Southern Literature Journal, 9 (Fall 1976): 47–60, which describes Porter's—and through her, Miranda's—alienation from the conventions of Southern womanhood.

13. The Letters of Katherine Mansfield, ed. J. Middleton Murry, 2 vols. (NY: Knopf, 1929) II: 454.

14. Daniel Curley, “Treasure in ‘The Grave,’” Modern Fiction Studies, 9 (Winter 1963–64): 377–84; Sister M. Joselyn, O.S.B., “‘The Grave’ as Lyrical Short Story,” Studies in Short Fiction, 1 (Spring 1964): 216–21; Constance Rooke and Bruce Wallis, “Myth and Epiphany in Porter's ‘The Grave,’” Studies in Short Fiction, 15 (Summer 1978): 269–75.

15. Evidence of the two author's religious beliefs further relevant to this point is too lengthy to pursue here, but can be found in the accepted biographies: for Mansfield, Antony Alpers, A Life of Katherine Mansfield (NY: Viking, 1980) and Jeffrey Meyers, Katherine Mansfield: A Biography (NY: New Directions, 1980); for Porter, Joan Givener, Katherine Anne Porter: Life (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1982).

16. Perry Miller, “Nature and the National Ego,” in Errand Into the Wilderness. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956) 216.

17. R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955) 101.