Essay 2 different story

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'Blown to Bits!': Katherine Mansfield's 'The Garden-Party' and the Great War Author: Christine Darrohn Date: Fall 1998 From: Modern Fiction Studies(Vol. 44, Issue 3) Reprint In: Short Story Criticism(Vol. 81) Document Type: Critical essay Length: 10,471 words

Full Text: [(essay date fall 1998) In the following essay, Darrohn contends that "The Garden Party" explores issues of class and gender as well as the devastating impact of World War I on Mansfield's generation.]

"Blown to bits!"

That is how Katherine Mansfield, still in shock just a few days after learning of her brother's death in the war, described him to a friend. Twenty-one-year-old Leslie "Chummie" Beauchamp had been stationed in France for less than a month when on 7 October 1915, as he was giving a hand grenade demonstration, a defective grenade blew up in his hand with a force so strong it killed both himself and his sergeant (Alpers 183). Mansfield's succinct description of her brother's death is brusque and colloquial but also literally true of uncountable soldiers who fought in the Great War. In her semiautobiographical novel We That Were Young, Irene Rathbone describes the wounded soldiers whom women in the Voluntary Aid Detachment (V.A.D.) routinely tended: men with "limbs which shrapnel had torn about and swollen into abnormal shapes, from which yellow pus poured when the bandages were removed, which were caked with brown blood, and in whose gangrenous flesh loose bits of bone had to be sought for painfully with probes" (194), a man "who, when his innumerable and complicated bandages were removed, revealed flat holes plugged with gauze where a nose had been, and pendulous shapeless lips" (200).

Another V.A.D., Mary Borden, evokes the same sense of nightmarish mutilation in a collage of body parts:

There are no men here. ... There are heads and knees and mangled testicles. There are chests with holes as big as your fist, and pulpy thighs, shapeless; and stumps where legs once were fastened. There are eyes--eyes of sick dogs, sick cats, blind eyes, eyes of delirium; and mouths that cannot articulate; and parts of faces--the nose gone, or the jaw. There are these things, but no men. ...(60)

This essay begins with the maimed and mangled men of the Great War in order to highlight what is distinctive, indeed peculiar, about the dead man found in Mansfield's 1921 short story "The Garden-Party." Like the men who perished in the mass, industrialized killings of the Great War, the carter, whose horse shies at a traction engine, falls victim to mechanized modernity. However, his corpse is very different from the mutilated bodies that pervade the literature of the Great War. It is "wonderful, beautiful," and "peaceful" (296). It is, in fact, "a marvel" (296). To view this body is not "awful," is, instead, "simply marvelous" (297). In "The Garden-Party," Mansfield creates a story that depends on a man's violent death even as it erases the traces of injury from his body. After the Great War, to imagine a beautiful corpse might seem either a grotesque act of escapism or a courageous feat of imagination. However, if we resist such simplistic reactions, the beautiful carter can give us insight into the way a society recovers from a war that jeopardizes the integrity of physical bodies as well as the stability of social categories.

Set in the New Zealand of her youth, Mansfield's "The Garden-Party" perhaps seems worlds away from the Great War. Indeed, while this is one of Mansfield's best known stories, previous critics almost universally have failed to read it in relation to the war. A notable exception to the critical neglect of this story's war context is No Man's Land. In this study of gender in twentieth-century British and American literature, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar point to a variety of texts, including "The Garden-Party," in which there are female characters "who achieve heroic stature through witnessing or facilitating male death, who feel inexplicably empowered by male deaths, or whose lives yield them fortuitous victories over dead or dying men" (1: 94-95). For Gilbert and Gubar, this trope signifies the empowerment many women experienced during the Great War, feeling "even at the height of the conflict that not only their society but also their art had been subtly strengthened, or at least strangely inspired, by the deaths and defeats of male contemporaries" (2: 307). Gilbert and Gubar argue, for example, that the dead Leslie Beauchamp was a muse for Mansfield, inspiring her best writing (2: 307). My reading of "The Garden-Party"--and, more broadly, of women's experience of the war--is significantly different. Gilbert and Gubar, emphasizing the exhilaration and liberation experienced by women as they were given new

responsibilities and opportunities on the homefront, acknowledge only briefly and parenthetically women's sorrow in the sufferings and deaths of men. In this essay, I trace the profoundly painful, lingering sense of loss that Mansfield experienced with the death of her brother. Moreover, reading parallels between Mansfield's personal loss and the anxieties spawned by the war in the upper and middle classes, I trace the way class as well as gender shaped one's experience of the war. In contrast, Gilbert and Gubar's inattention to class prevents them from seeing crucial differences in the representations of dead men in postwar texts. While the death of the working-class man exhilarates Laura Sheridan in "The Garden-Party," the death of the middle-class Leslie leaves Mansfield feeling "just as much dead as he is" (Journal 89). Similarly, in Mrs. Dalloway (another text cited by Gilbert and Gubar), Clarissa's buoyant sense that Septimus Smith's death "[makes] her feel the beauty; [makes] her feel the fun" (284) is in sharp contrast to the devastating end of Woolf's earlier novel Jacob's Room as Bonamy and Betty Flanders react to the palpable absence of the upper-middle-class Jacob.1

Because "The Garden-Party" is very much about the class system, reading it as a piece of war literature enables us to ask questions that have been ignored, not only by Gilbert and Gubar, but by most scholars of the Great War.2 Recent years have seen an outburst of interdisciplinary interest in the Great War, especially in its impact on traditional gender systems, but little attempt has been made to sustain a discussion that interweaves a consideration of both class and gender.3 While scholars of gender bring us repeatedly to the question of how (and if) the Great War prompted reconstructions of femininity and masculinity, this essay attends to the complexly intertwined inscription of class and gender as it seeks a more nuanced understanding of the social dislocations produced by the war. I will demonstrate that in "The Garden-Party" Mansfield tries to imagine a moment when class and gender divisions cease to matter but that ultimately she cannot sustain this hopeful vision. At the same time as this story approaches the vexed subject of the class and gender system, it bears the burden of working through Mansfield's grief over the loss of her brother. This personal grief parallels the anxieties of the middle and upper classes, whose young men faced in the Great War's trenches the daily threat of mass, industrialized injury and death that was part of society's traditional construct of working-class, not middle- or upper-class, masculinity. Focusing on the multiple tasks that "The Garden-Party" performs, this essay asks us to think about the conflicting demands of the postwar period: specifically, the painful task of mourning and recovery and the ways in which this task complicates the project of critiquing a society that is founded on the structures of exclusion, hierarchy, and dominance that foster wars.

"There He Lay"

According to her husband, of all Mansfield's friends who went to the war, none returned alive (Journal 107). The most devastating death was that of her brother. After it, her Journal explodes with some of Mansfield's most aching, viscerally haunting writing, which is often addressed directly to Leslie with such tags as "my playfellow, my brother" (96), "my little boy" (85), "my little boy brother" (97), "my darling" (86), "[d]earest heart" (86), and "my little sun" (94). Not all critics, however, have lent a sympathetic ear to this cri de coeur. To Frank O'Connor, "her reaction [to Leslie's death] was violent, even immoderate." He feels "it is all girlishly overdramatic in the Katherine Mansfield way," although he admits "that is no reflection on its sincerity" (177). To Jeffrey Meyers, her grief was not merely "profound," but "morbid," indeed "pathological" (121). He points out that Mansfield "longed to join him in death, felt that she had died, and developed mystical yearnings" (120); in fact, Mansfield did do these things, but, one could argue, these are perfectly normal moments in the course of mourning a loved one. Moreover, judging Mansfield in her grief is not the most useful thing one can do in the presence of her writing about Leslie; instead, the textual representations of Leslie that spring from Mansfield's mourning can give us insight into a key aspect of war, the noncombatant's experience of death. In an article on elegy in Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Gillian Beer very wisely reminds us of a context beyond Woolf's personal experience with death, a context that is key to making the richest use of Mansfield's representations of Leslie: "death was ... the special knowledge of her entire generation, through the obliterative experience of the first world war" (36). If Mansfield's grief is, as O'Connor says, "violent, even immoderate," it is grief that is born of, grief in the face of, the immoderate violence of war. Reading, rather than judging, the writing that came from that grief, we can think about the ways survivors of war employ imagination and language to represent and recuperate from the costs of war.4

As one might expect, over the course of Mansfield's mourning, the mood of her writing ranges widely--from stoic acceptance to profound depression. Despite the shifts in mood, however, one thing remains constant: Leslie is actively resurrected in a process that Mansfield links inextricably with her writing. "Each time I take up my pen you are with me," she explains simply (96). Her new dedication to writing about the New Zealand of her girlhood is a way to resurrect her brother; in that writing, she says, "we shall range all over our country together" (96). The Leslie that emerges in the Journal is close at hand and thoroughly corporeal, someone seen, heard, and touched. As Mansfield writes, he is "back with [her]," "stepping forward"; she "will come quite close to [him]" and "take [his] hand" (97). In another passage Mansfield reports, "[A]s I write these words ... I see you opposite to me, I see your thoughtful, shining eyes"; he calls her name and smiles (96). In another entry, she "run[s] out on to the landing," and Leslie enters the house, throws his hat and stick on the hall table, runs up the steps, hugs and kisses Mansfield (157).

Throughout these entries, a key pattern is repeated: despite the boundary of death, any separation between Mansfield and her brother is gradually dissolved. But the imagination that can unite Mansfield with a resurrected Leslie can also imagine the scene of his death. In February 1916, four months after his death, Mansfield records one of the most disturbing images in the Journal: "[W]hen I leaned out of the window I seemed to see my brother dotted all over the field--now on his back, now on his face, now huddled up, now half-pressed into the earth. Wherever I looked, there he lay" (95). Unlike the other representations of Leslie, here he is viewed in the scene of war, the multiple sightings of Leslie turning "the field" outside Mansfield's window into the battlefield of dead young men. At the same time, in the way Leslie is "dotted" over the field, the image evokes that initial sense of Leslie being blown to "bits," thus overlaying on the scene of mass carnage the particular scene of Leslie's death. What is most significant about this image is that for Mansfield it is incomprehensible. Although she feels "that God showed him to [her] like that for some express purpose," she cannot decipher it (95). War, which destroys the physical integrity of bodies, seems necessarily to endanger the potential of bodies to make meaning.

The passage, furthermore, suggests that war jeopardizes the identity of the female, noncombatant survivor. Through Mansfield's careful rearrangement of chronology, this, the only passage in the Journal in which a landscape of war dead is evoked, ends with the

complete invasion of her body, the complete loss of her own identity. The vision of Leslie in the field is the first event that she describes but chronologically the last to occur. In the next event that is described (actually, the first to happen), Leslie is suddenly inside--not merely in the home, but specifically in Mansfield's bed. Finally (in the second event chronologically), the distance between Mansfield and Leslie is utterly dissolved: "Perhaps because I went to sleep thinking of him, I woke and was he, for quite a long time. I felt my face was his serious, sleepy face. I felt that the lines of my mouth were changed, and I blinked like he did on waking" (95). The passage suggests that the role ascribed to women in the postwar world--to mourn and to remember the dead young soldiers-- puts their own identities at risk.5

While the diminishment of distance in other passages brings comfort, the February 1916 passage is far less sanguine about this extreme union of Mansfield and Leslie. Earlier, in October 1915, Mansfield writes with passionate pleasure about belonging to Leslie, pointedly contrasting that relationship to her relationship with her husband: "You know I can never be Jack's lover again. You have me. ... I give Jack my 'surplus' love, but to you I hold and to you I give my deepest love" (86). In contrast, in the February 1916 passage, despite the relatively impassive tone of Mansfield's voice, the presence of Leslie in Mansfield's bed is clearly unsettling: "[W]hen I lay in bed, I felt suddenly passionate. I wanted J. to embrace me. But as I turned to speak to him or to kiss him I saw my brother lying fast asleep, and I got cold" (95). Similarly, while the October 1915 passage offers, "You're in my flesh as well as in my soul," as a triumphant cry to mark the complete union of Mansfield and Leslie (86), the end of the February 1916 passage when Mansfield wakes as her brother and feels her face is his is devoid of any sense of celebration. With the diction of causality-- "because"--and deliberative consideration--"perhaps"--the narrative voice remains cool, betraying no emotions, yet the careful ordering of events suggests that Mansfield is puzzling over the invasive mobility of this dead Leslie.

Five years after writing the anxious Journal entry, Mansfield will write a story set in the New Zealand of her girlhood, a place and time far removed from war. With war a buried but crucial context, "The Garden-Party" stages a reunion of the key figures from the Journal writings about Leslie: Mansfield, a resurrected Leslie, and the corpse that so troubles the February 1916 passage.

Figuring Leslie in "The Garden-Party"

As numerous critics have noted, Laura and Laurie Sheridan, who appear in "The Garden-Party" and several other stories set in New Zealand, have a close relationship that is reminiscent of the bond between Mansfield and her brother. In Laurie's first appearance in "The Garden-Party," Laura runs to him and gives him "a small quick squeeze," which he returns as he speaks to her in a "warm, boyish voice" (285). At the end of the story, Laura takes his arm and "press[es] up against him"; he "put[s] his arm round her shoulder" and speaks to her in "his warm, loving voice" (297). These descriptions do more than recall the affection between Mansfield and her brother; they echo specifically those passages in the Journal when Mansfield, in the months following Leslie's death, works through her loss by imaginatively resurrecting him into someone who is near her, his "lip lift[ing] in a smile" (96), someone who "puts his arm round [her], holding [her] tightly," kissing her (157). As youthful, affectionate, and energetic as Leslie in the Journal is Laurie in "The Garden-Party" who, "half-way upstairs," "turn[s] round and ... suddenly puff[s] out his cheeks and goggle[s] his eyes" at his sister, exclaiming, "My word ... you do look stunning" (292).

However, Leslie's presence in "The Garden-Party" is not limited to Laurie. "There lay a young man, fast asleep," begins the description of the dead carter Laura views at the end of the story (296). This language immediately brings to mind the representation of Leslie in the February 1916 Journal entry: outside her window, "there he lay"; in her bed, he lies "fast asleep" (95). The parallels in language highlight the profound differences between the two bodies. While, at the end of the Journal passage, Leslie awakens by taking command of Mansfield's body, in "The Garden-Party" the narrative voice, aligned with Laura's point of view, commands, "Never wake him up again" (296). While the Journal passage is structured around a gradual diminishment of distance between the living and the dead, the description of Scott in "The Garden-Party" insists on his distance: "sleeping so soundly, so deeply, that he was far, far away ..." (296). Unlike the image of Leslie in the Journal, the "express purpose" of which Mansfield cannot discover (95), Scott's body is comprehensible and purposeful, for this silent face speaks. Bringing Laura into the presence of Scott, Mansfield revises the image of the dead young man whose appearance in the Journal is so unsettling. In "The Garden-Party" that terrifying image is transformed into a picture of beautiful, peaceful, still wholeness, an image to assuage anxieties that the war raises--not merely for Mansfield, but for an entire society--about the vulnerability of the male body to violence.

In the descriptions of the fragmenting damage that characterizes the violence of the Great War, we find only bits of men; in Scott, Mansfield restores a remarkable, emphatic wholeness to the male corpse. A sense of wholeness is created by the way the description of the body is contained within a single paragraph, filling out that space completely. Because of lulling, rhythmic repetition, Scott is held in a peaceful moment of great stillness in contrast to the deadly energy of war in which people are blown to bits:

There lay a young man, fast asleep--sleeping so soundly, so deeply, that he was far, far away from them both. Oh, so remote, so peaceful. He was dreaming. Never wake him up again. His head was sunk in the pillow, his eyes were closed; they were blind under the closed eyelids. 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. Happy ... happy. ... All is well, said that sleeping face. This is just as it should be. I am content.(296; original ellipses)

The impression of restful stillness is accentuated by the contrast between this moment and the "quick, incessant, feverishly busy" quality of the party preparations in the first half of the story (Zapf 47).

In perhaps the most radical revision of the corpse, the metaphor of sleep creates the impression that death is a choice voluntarily selected over life. At the beginning of the description, Laura commands, "Never wake him up again," as though it were possible for him to be revived. At the end of the description, she imagines Scott confirms her choice, his face saying, "This is just as it should be."

This moment when the corpse speaks, the culmination of the paragraph, is testimony to the desire to make the corpse meaningful.

Peter Brooks, who in Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative looks at the relation between bodies and narrative in a broadly defined modern era (from the mid-eighteenth century through the present), argues that scenes in which bodies are inscribed or imprinted are deeply motivated by "a desire that the body not be lost to meaning--that it be brought into the realm of the semiotic and the significant" (22). In the context of a war in which the integrity of bodies is in constant peril and the destruction of bodies can be both tragically and farcically purposeless--recall that Leslie is killed by a hand grenade as he demonstrates how to use a hand grenade--the desire for bodies to make meaning could not be more desperate or precarious.

It is easy to see how comforting the figure of Scott is. Here is not the violent, fragmenting damage one learns of in a telegram and then must imagine. here is a still moment of a sustained gaze in which the male corpse is viewed in its wholeness, peace, and beauty. Yet much more is invested in this figure that so clearly represents an attempt to revisit and revise the dead of the Great War. The figure that conducts the task of rewriting away the damages of war is specifically a man of the working class. Although war is a crucial context for this figure, it is a deeply buried one; the story makes no direct reference to the war. Instead, the context in which Scott is directly embedded is a working-class milieu. Indeed, the end of the story is set up as the middle-class Laura's confrontation with the working class as much as with death in a scene in which class divisions, an undercurrent throughout the text, leap forcefully to the forefront. In the rest of this essay, I will examine Scott's function in a story that deals not merely with the war's physical destructiveness but also with the war's troubling of class identity.

Numerous critics have written insightfully on Mansfield's portrayal of the class system in "The Garden-Party." In general, this criticism probes the degree to which Laura, by the end of the story, transcends the values and prejudices of her class. Most critics agree that her transcendence is far from complete.6 However, by neglecting the war context, this criticism has failed to untangle an important level of meaning in the story. I will argue that there is a connection between Laura's ambivalent movement away from her class and the profound ambivalence about class identity that was a lingering effect of the war on the middle and upper classes.

"Down the Lane"

With the very first sentence of the story, Mansfield pulls us into the charmed world of the middle class. "[T]he weather was ideal," we are told; "[t]hey could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it" (282). As the story progresses, we find that this middle-class family can order nearly anything. Thus, the beauty of their garden-party results from the labors of a host of workers--the gardener, who "up since dawn, mow[s] the lawns and sweep[s] them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine" (282); the workmen, who assemble the marquee where they have determined it will look best; Hans, who moves the furniture and sweeps the carpet; the cook, who makes fifteen different kinds of sandwiches; Godber's man, who brings the cream puffs that are so famous "[n]obody ever thought of making them at home" (288); and Sadie, who oversees the steady parade of commodities arriving at the Sheridans' home. Yet, as the opening paragraph hints, the Sheridans operate under the illusion that their easy life is natural, perhaps even divinely created, rather than produced through others' labor. The roses themselves seem to "underst[and] that roses are the only flowers that impress people at garden-parties," so "[h]undreds, yes, literally hundreds, had come out in a single night"; the bushes, "bow[ing] down as though they ha[ve] been visited by archangels, " suggest divine sanction (282).

As the preparations for the Sheridans' party are completed, a short distance away "down the hill" (294) where gardens are reserved not for giving parties but for producing food ("cabbage stalks" and "sick hens" [290]), the body of a carter is returned to his home. To Mrs. Sheridan, who represents the consciousness of the privileged middle class, Scott's death is not a matter of concern and her daughter's belief that the party must be stopped is simply "absurd" (291). Mrs. Sheridan succeeds in diverting Laura from her concerns, and the party occurs without interruption. But at the end of the story when Laura is sent down the lane with the leftover party food, the text's focus on the secluded middle-class world is permanently interrupted, and we are left with the image of a girl whose tie to that class has been loosened.

Laura is uniquely ready for an experience that will transform her relation to the classes. She is the only Sheridan who feels an affinity with the working class. Early in the story, in the presence of the men who are setting up the marquee, she thinks, "How very nice workmen were!" (283). Disdaining "these absurd class distinctions," she bites into her bread-and-butter, looks at a workman's diagram of the marquee, and feels "just like a work-girl" (284). That Laura's identification with the working class represents a threat to her class is evident; precisely at the moment she makes this imaginative leap, she is reclaimed by the middle-class world, which speaks through an anonymous voice that summons her home to take a telephone call (284).

At first glance, the encounter between Laura and Scott seems a celebration of the transcendence of social boundaries. Before the encounter, the lane where Scott lives, like most sites of otherness, is perceived as both fascinating and repulsive. It is "disgusting and sordid" with its "little mean dwellings," "revolting language," and disease; nevertheless, "on their prowls" Laura and Laurie "must see everything" (290). In Laura's private moment with the dead carter, this sense of thrilling sordidness is replaced by a feeling of intimate communion. In this communion, as the middle-class girl takes possession of Scott with her gaze, he is released from the commodity culture in which men's possession of their own identities is seriously jeopardized. Scott first enters the text when a delivery man who arrives at the Sheridans' home tells the story of the carter's death. In the delivery man's lack of a name, the text evokes the power of the modern capitalist system to deprive the working-class man of possession of his own identity. The delivery man is not merely nameless; his name is written over by the name of his employer, "Godber's man." While the owner of the catering firm gives his name to his business, the employee loses his. "The Garden-Party," which with its record of one delivery after another represents "a society in which people are related primarily through the commodities they exchange or possess" (Stoll 43),7 finds its most restful moment when a working-class man is defined not by any commodity but rather by the insight into life that he seems to embody.

The extent to which Laura has been changed by this encounter is cued by the story's final scene when Laurie comes to fetch her home. Throughout the story, Laura's close bond with her brother has been apparent, yet Laurie has participated in the suppression of her potential to break free from the middle class. When Laurie returns home from work, Laura remembers the carter's accident that she, with uneasy reluctance, has been persuaded by her sister and mother to forget. She intends to tell Laurie about it, feeling that if

he concurs with the others, "then it [is] bound to be all right" (292). While Laura looks to Laurie as a special guide, he, in fact, acts merely as the extension of their mother, who is the forceful agent of a middle-class mentality. Laurie's praise for the hat that Mrs. Sheridan has used to distract and mollify Laura deflects her from mentioning the dead man. Later, as Laura walks home after viewing Scott, she meets Laurie "[a]t the corner of the lane" (296). Laura and Laurie have been accustomed to "prow[ing]" together through the working-class lane (290), but tonight Laurie, serving as emissary for Mrs. Sheridan, comes no farther than the outer periphery of the lane.

The distance Laura has journeyed from Laurie can be measured by their conversation of miscommunication. Although Laura answers, "Yes, quite," when he asks her, "Was it all right?" he cannot believe this (296-97). "Was it awful?" he asks shortly thereafter, unable to imagine any other explanation for her tears (297). Laura "stammer[s]," "Isn't life ... isn't life--" and the narrator says, "But what life was she couldn't explain. No matter. He quite understood" (297). Many readers erroneously ignore the irony that becomes unmistakable in the word "quite."8 The narrator is clearly ventriloquizing the voices we have heard throughout the scene, these distinctly middle-class voices with their expressions--"Isn't it, darling?" "Yes, quite," and "simply marvelous" (297)--which are utterly inadequate for the task Laura is attempting. Laurie's cool, flippant, "Isn't it, darling?" is particularly jarring; in contrast to Laura's earnest attempt to express what life is, Laurie's remark sounds glib. The truth is that by the end of the story Laurie no longer understands Laura because she has been irrevocably changed by her encounter with Scott. Throughout the story, Laura and Laurie's relationship has been marked by incestuous overtones (which parallel in muted form the incestuous element to Mansfield's romanticizing of her dead brother). At the end of the story Laura has been liberated from this bond to her brother. Reading Laura and Laurie's incestuous relationship as a figure for the enclosure of the middle-class world, the rupturing of the bond between Laura and Laurie indicates that Laura has detached herself not merely from her brother, but also from that entire world.

My reading thus far reveals the apparent meaning of "The Garden-Party," but this story offers a complex layering of interconnected, sometimes contradictory meanings. When Laura, a middle-class girl, admires Scott, a working-class man, the wholeness and beauty of his body would seem to signify the potential for society to become whole and beautiful, unmarred by exclusion, hierarchy, and dominance. Yet everything surrounding Scott, especially the other bodies in his home, is distorted by a vision that is virulently classist. Scott's widow has a "terrible" face that is "puffed up, red, with swollen eyes and swollen lips," and his sister-in-law's face, also "swollen," bears an "oily" smile (296). Corporeal grotesqueness is paralleled by orthographic distortions. While Scott's face "speaks" in a voice that is indistinguishable from the controlled, elegant prose of the narrative--"All is well. ... This is just as it should be. I am content" (296)--the "oily voice" of his sister-in-law is insistently marked by "'er" (295), "'im" (296), "'e" (296), and "thenk" (296), blatant class indicators that even the speech of Godber's man and the marquee installers lacks.9 While the "marvel" that is Scott is "wonderful" and "beautiful" (296), Laura's visit to the Scotts' home only intensifies the impression gained by Laura and Laurie on their "prowls" that the lane is "disgusting and sordid" (290). Clearly, the figure of Scott is functioning in a complex process of repression, rather than transcendence, of class antipathy.

The way the text separates the conflicting attitudes that characterize any apprehension of the other--fascination and revulsion--is unsettling not only because it troubles the story's apparent plot about a girl who escapes the prejudices of her class but also because, in this careful distillation, anxieties about the working class, channeled away from Scott, are displaced onto the women in the house and thereby become conflated with anxieties about the maternal feminine. The Scotts' house is distinctly gendered female. To ascertain that she has reached the right address, Laura asks, "Is this Mrs. Scott's house?" not Mr. Scott's (295). The house is guarded by "an old, old woman" who sits at the gate and watches (295). Inside, with the exception of the corpse, there are only women, the widow, named Em ("M" for mother? and for Mansfield?), and Em's sister. Even the physical design of the house seems insistently feminine: at every turn, Laura finds herself "shut in the passage" that suggests the birth canal (295). This image, like the other images of femininity, is thoroughly negative, for the passage is a "gloomy" trap (295): when Laura wants "only ... to get out, to get away," she finds herself "back in the passage" (296). In this context the widow's grotesque face, "puffed up" and "swollen," hints at a repulsive image of pregnancy (296). The possessive found in the colloquial expression "my lass" that the old woman at the gate addresses to Laura suggests that Laura belongs to this female world (295), and when Em's sister invites Laura to view Scott, she also employs the possessive in "my lass" and "my dear" (296). However, Scott releases Laura from the world of these women. As Laura views the "wonderful, beautiful" corpse, his face quickly obliterates the memory of the "terrible" faces of the grieving women (296). Laura's lingering view of the male body so thoroughly overtakes the text that, although Em's sister does not leave the room, she does disappear from the text.

Robert Murray Davis, too, notices that the sight of Scott "blots out for Laura her glimpse of the wife," but for him this is merely a sign "that Laura is ... attempting to retreat, to escape harsh reality ..." (64). It is necessary to specify more clearly from what Laura is escaping. Clare Hanson and Andrew Gurr offer one possibility. Claiming that "[t]he dead man's widow and sister-in-law make little impression on her [Laura], for all their swollen faces, compared with the peaceful sleep of the dead man," they observe that Laura's "growth as an adolescent is implied ... in the affinity she feels for the men of the story [the marquee installers and Laurie, in addition to Scott] as much as it is shown by her divergence from her mother and sisters" (115). However, they do not probe the significance of this striking pattern by which maturity is gendered masculine and immaturity (as well as class elitism, so evident in Mrs. Sheridan and Jose) is gendered feminine. Moreover, their reading tends to dilute the startling aspect of this scene: a portrait of the working class that is sharply polarized by gender.

Criticism of "The Garden-Party" has left crucial questions unanswered. Why, when the text takes pleasure in a beautiful, working- class man, does working-class femininity become so monstrous? Why, in this girl's coming-of-age story, does the passage to maturity entail not just separation from a mother and sister, but anxious flight from the female body, as represented by working-class women?

Mansfield's life and, more generally, the situation of women in the early twentieth century provide obvious, but only partial, answers to the last question. Having fled her family's bourgeois home in New Zealand, Mansfield almost immediately encountered the difficulties of a woman trying to pursue an independent life at a time when there were few escapes from the trap of women's biology. She arrived in London in 1908, took a lover, and soon found herself pregnant. She was only nineteen years old. Understandably panicky, the young Mansfield married a man (not her lover, who could not marry her), but after a day she left him. Four or five months later the

pregnancy ended in a miscarriage.10 Although pregnancy is not experienced identically by women of all classes, the distinctions between women in "The Garden-Party" seem somewhat overdrawn; in this story, the sharply polarized portraits of women displace the burdens of women's biology onto the working class, wishfully muting the harsh realities faced by women from even the middle and upper classes.

Appropriately, then, in the bond that Laura achieves with Scott, sexual currents are kept blurred and subdued. Though the man would seem to be a figure of potent sexuality--he is a "young chap" who has fathered five children (289)--and though the scene takes place, of all places, in the marital bedroom, Laura's gaze dilutes his sexual corporeality, texturing it with aesthetic pleasure. Indeed, within the aestheticizing grip of Laura's gaze, the corporeality of Scott vanishes into linguistic abstraction as the "young man, fast asleep" whom we see at the beginning of the paragraph becomes simply "this marvel" (296). Thus, the sexual potential between Laura and the marquee installers, whom she found so appealing early in the story, is averted, as those workmen are transmogrified into the utterly safe figure of a dead man. As Carol Siegel notes, Laura's communion with the dead man "involves no real (and so dangerous) embraces," thereby "resolv[ing] the problem of her attraction to workers" (305). While on one level Laura's appreciation of Scott's beauty points to a new relation between the classes, it simultaneously reflects an anxious desire that the burdens of female heterosexuality be averted, displaced onto working-class women.

In her work on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women's literature, Cora Kaplan draws attention to "ways in which women of the middle and upper classes understood and represented their own being" by "projecting and displacing on to women of lower social standing and women of colour ... all that was deemed vicious and regressive in women as a sex" even in texts that express an overt sympathy with women from marginalized social categories (60). The pattern of displacement in "The Garden-Party" is, thus, not entirely distinctive to this text or even to this period. Yet, the general pattern that Kaplan describes conveys different meanings in different contexts. My argument is that Mansfield's bifurcated portrait of the working class encodes specific anxieties characteristic of the years following the Great War. In the figure of Scott, Mansfield puts back together the men destroyed in the war and signifies their wholeness and safety by reserving the most violent images for the women with their "swollen," "red," "terrible" faces (296). Through this displacement of violence, the text subtly points to the damaging effects on women of their postwar roles: as mourners, to remember the dead young soldiers; as mothers, to repopulate the decimated nation. In Scott's widow and sister-in-law, Mansfield conflates these two roles: mourning distorts the women's faces into the repulsive image of pregnancy. As haunted as "The Garden- Party" is by the dead young soldiers, this story hints that female identity is the more troubling, is ultimately the unresolvable, problem.

In the shadow of war, Mansfield's search for a comforting image of male death ends in curiously familiar territory: beheld in Laura's aestheticizing gaze, Scott's corpse displays the muteness, beauty, and passivity that characterize the most traditional ideal of middle- class femininity. Thus, while Laura in her admiration of Scott seems to achieve at least a partial loosening of the bonds to her class, she actually reinforces her tie to her gender and class subjectivity--and, as Mansfield makes clear, its limitations. Self-aestheticization is a part of middle-class women's training that denies them political awareness and agency. To distract Laura from her concerns about the dead workman, Mrs. Sheridan exclaims over her appearance in a new hat: "I have never seen you look such a picture" (291). The middle-class mother instructs her daughter to perceive herself as an aesthetic object: "Look at yourself!" Mrs. Sheridan commands as she holds up a hand mirror (291). Despite the hat's funereal color, the picture of a "charming girl in the mirror, in her black hat trimmed with gold daisies, and a long black velvet ribbon" supersedes the image of "that poor woman and those little children, and the body being carried into the house," which becomes to Laura "blurred, unreal, like a picture in the newspaper" (292). Later in the Scotts' home, the dead man's sister-in-law compares him explicitly to "a picture," linking him to Laura's earlier perception of herself (296). Laura's gaze does, indeed, render Scott an aesthetic object, and through this aestheticization Laura again averts a confrontation with the painful facts about the lives of the working class as Scott's violent death is transformed into a "marvel" that has "come to the lane" (296).11 Though Laura tries to resist her mother's social blindness, Mansfield casts doubt on Laura's ultimate success. Scott's eyes, we are told, are "blind under the closed eyelids," but the suggestion is that perhaps it is Laura who is blind (296).

Laura's dubious success is tied to the text's profound ambivalence. Even as the text nudges its protagonist from her class, it is pervaded by an unmistakable nostalgia for the beauty and safety of that world. Significantly, the story ends precisely at the moment at which the young woman who has left her middle-class home is still clasped in her brother's loving embrace. The nostalgia for "the perfect afternoon [that] slowly ripened, slowly faded, slowly its petals closed" signals a tie to the middle-class world that the text is not willing to abandon (293).

This nostalgia is the socially acceptable manifestation of the text's investment, at its deepest levels, in a disturbingly traditional class framework. Shifting Laurie's (and Leslie's) death onto Scott, the text reinscribes the traditional role of the working class as bearers of the bodily burdens of society. The cruel irony, of course, is that the Great War spared no class. In fact, in the cultural memory it even seemed to strike the upper class especially hard. As early as the opening months of the war, British commentators were reporting-- and worrying--that death rates were highest among men of the upper class (Winter 449). These perceptions, which persisted well after the conclusion of the war, were not entirely unfounded. Among Oxford and Cambridge graduates, for example, deaths were almost one and a half times the national average (Wohl 266 n. 57). Such disparities were partly due to the dangerous duties performed by subalterns, who were generally from the elite class: leading charges, conducting raids, and checking the wire in front of trenches (Wohl 114).

The anxiety about the decimation of a generation of upper-class men, however, reflected more than real disparities in casualties. Mansfield's words after learning of her brother's death are revealing: "I don't believe it; he was not the kind to die" (qtd. in Alpers 183). While she undoubtedly was referring to his personal qualities, the truth is, within the framework of traditional assumptions about the classes, he, like the other young soldiers from the middle and upper classes, was not the kind to die the deaths that the Great War dealt. "Athleticism," an important prewar movement, had fostered the ideal of the physically fit man who, embodying the courage, loyalty, leadership, and cooperation of the sporting field, would serve his country, but the battlefields of the Great War bore no connection to traditional, chivalric images of combat: flooded, rat-infested trenches, weapons that killed massively and from a distance so that one killed and was killed by an enemy one did not necessarily see, comrades' bodies--and pieces of bodies--

immured in the sodden or frozen landscape. Widely considered by historians to be the first modern war, the Great War was conducted with weaponry that represented the latest and most fearsome of technological developments--machine guns, tanks, combat airplanes, and poison gas--and with such vast numbers of men that the individual was no longer visible. Frequently Great War writers expressed their impression that the soldier was no longer a human--and certainly not a hero--but rather just another piece of the war's arsenal. "My God, why am I a man at all, when this is all, this machinery piercing and tearing?" D. H. Lawrence wrote in dismay after observing the Bavarian army on maneuvers just before the war in 1913; "[i]t is a war of artillery, a war of machines, and men no more than the subjective material of the machine" (qtd. in Field 214). While the conditions of this war were physically and psychically threatening to men of all classes, for men of the middle and upper classes the war represented a radical toppling of traditional constructs of identity. In the industrialized killing of the Great War, the men who had been bred to inherit the reins of cultural and political power entered a zone of mass, anonymous peril comparable to the dangers of the factory or the mine; the daily threat of industrial injury and death was part of society's construct of working-class, not middle- or upper-class, masculinity. While scholarship traditionally has privileged the experiences of combatants, I would emphasize the extent to which middle- and upper- class civilians were also disturbed by the war's erosion of traditional class constructs. That erosion was painfully manifest to them in the staggering number of injured and dead men from their classes.12

The description of Laura's journey to the Scotts' home, with its emphasis on descent and darkness, employs the imaginative geography by which the upper and middle classes imagined their separation from the working class: "down below in the hollow the little cottages were in deep shade," and the people form a "dark knot" in the "smoky and dark" lane (294-95). Even as the description recalls turn-of-the-century writings about the working class, it equally suggests the more recent imagery of modern trench warfare. The iconographic slippage between the battle zone and the working class is emblematic of the social dislocations produced by this war which, sparing no class, was devastatingly equitable.

In "The Garden-Party," beneath the apparent plot, in which a young girl breaks free from her enclosed middle-class world, is a hidden story about a war that ruptures the middle-class illusion of secure enclosure. Just as the text displaces onto Scott the deaths of the young, upper-class men, it displaces onto Scott's widow and sister-in-law the roles of mourner and mother that women of all classes are asked to perform in the postwar era. In the repulsively terrifying images of these women we can measure the anxieties of middle-class women, who find themselves suddenly in a world where their class no longer guarantees safety. In "The Garden-Party, " nostalgia for "the perfect afternoon" veils the unspoken--the unspeakable--fantasy that the war's devastation be borne by the working class.

If this story performs crude and cruel displacements, it is brave enough to encourage us to notice them. As Davis reminds us, Mansfield carefully places clues to indicate that the evidence of Scott's fatal injury is not actually absent, only hidden: Em's sister's remark, "There's nothing to show," the earlier mention of a head injury as the cause of death, and the detail in the description of Scott that his head is sunk in the pillow (64). Hinging on the figure of a dead man whose beauty hides the traces of injury, "The Garden- Party" invites us to look deeply for the raw wound hidden at its center. That previous readers have overlooked the buried levels of meaning is testimony to a number of intersecting desires: that the body and meaning and society be whole and unified.

It would be wrong to discount the overt story told in "The Garden-Party" as merely an elaborate mask behind which the true meaning hides. Like many of her contemporaries, Mansfield is drawn to the vision of a community unfissured by social divisions. The public monuments and rituals by which the war is commemorated figure a community in which social rank has ceased to matter. The Cenotaph honors "The Glorious Dead" of all classes. Similarly, the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, which pays tribute to a man whose name, rank, class, and regional origins are unknown, implicitly signifies that such distinctions do not, or should not, matter. Reporting on the burial of the Unknown Warrior in 1920, The Times of London highlighted his unknown origins to emphasize the expansive community that he embodied:

The Unknown Warrior whose body was to be buried may have been born to high position or to low; he may have been a sailor, a soldier, an airman; an Englishman, a Scotsman, a Welshman, an Irishman, a man of the Dominion, a Sikh, a Gurkha. No one knows. But he was one who gave his life for the people of the British Empire.("The Warrior Laid to Rest")

As another article explained, "when men die for each other there is to be no distinction between them" ([Untitled]). Not only did the Unknown Warrior suggest a classless community of war dead; he also created, at least temporarily, a community of mourners unmarred by social barriers and distinctions: "we were made one people, participants in one act of remembrance" ([Untitled]). Social and political rank of even the highest order was imagined inconsequential:

We saw and yet did not see the King walking immediately behind the coffin. We knew that the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Connaught, the Duke of York, the Prime Minister, and a long file of Ministers were there, and that Lord Haig and Lord Beatty were among the pallbearers. But all these were only sharers in a tribute in which the humblest widow or mother in the Abbey had an equal part.("The Warrior Laid to Rest")

For the middle and upper classes, the legacy of the Great War was deep ambivalence: the desire to experience an undivided society and the need to mourn the losses of one's own class, not just the lost men, but also the lost sense of safe enclosure in class privilege.

My formulation of the Great War's fueling of both desire for and anxiety about a projected classless community calls to mind Marianne DeKoven's work on modernist narrative. In Rich and Strange, DeKoven argues that the distinguishing quality of modernist literature is its "unresolved contradiction" (21), its "irreducible undecidability" (14). In this aesthetic of "unsynthesized dialectic" (21), modernist writers, claims DeKoven, found a means of representing their ambivalence about "the radical remaking of culture" promised by turn-of-the-century feminism and socialism (20). The prospect of social change was both appealing and terrifying: "male modernists generally feared the loss of their own hegemony implicit in such wholesale revision of culture, while female modernists generally feared punishment for their dangerous desire for that revision" (20). One might add, as my reading of "The Garden-Party"

suggests, middle- and upper-class female modernists also feared the loss of hegemony to the extent that their class position gave them privileges. While I concede DeKoven's point that "[m]odernist formal practice emerged unevenly within a general period, roughly 1890-1910" and "its development was not tied to any specific historical progression of events in radical history" (5), my reading of "The Garden-Party" suggests the need for inquiring more closely into the kind of intervention the Great War posed in this general climate of revolutionary social movements and literary practices. In the "unresolved contradiction" of "The Garden-Party," a story that is about a girl who both does and does not break free from her enclosed middle-class world, Mansfield encodes the painful ambivalence produced by a war that magnified the desire for radical social change even as it enacted--to a terrifying extreme--what the loss of hegemony could entail.

Notes

1. For important critiques of Gilbert and Gubar's work on the Great War, see Jane Marcus's "The Asylums of Antaeus: Women, War, and Madness--Is there a Feminist Fetishism?" and Claire M. Tylee's "'Maleness Run Riot'--The Great War and Women's Resistance to Militarism."

2. In describing "The Garden-Party" as war literature, I seek to challenge traditional definitions of war literature and, implicitly, of war itself. Margaret and Patrice Higonnet have argued eloquently for fundamental revisions in how we define war. While "[m]asculinist history has stressed the sharply defined event of war," they urge us to "move beyond the exceptional, marked event, which takes place on a specifically militarized front or in public and institutionally defined areas, to include the private domain and the landscape of the mind" (46). Mansfield wrote a handful of stories in which the war is a more obvious presence than it is in "The Garden-Party": "An Indiscreet Journey," "Spring Pictures," "Late at Night," "Two Tuppenny Ones, Please," "Six Years Later," and "The Fly." Perhaps because the war is a buried presence in "The Garden-Party," this story is able to encode such a probing meditation on the experience of war. Tylee overlooks "The Garden-Party" but offers useful analyses of "An Indiscreet Journey" and "The Fly" (Great War 83-91, 167-69).

3. Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory and Eric J. Leed's No Man's Land: Combat & Identity in World War I are classic studies of the Great War and masculinity. In addition to the previously mentioned works by Gilbert and Gubar, Higonnet and Higonnet, Marcus, and Tylee, important studies of the Great War and femininity include the following: Margaret Higonnet's "Women in the Forbidden Zone: War, Women, and Death" and "Not So Quiet in No-Woman's-Land," Susan Kingsley Kent's Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain, and Marcus's "The Nurse's Text: Acting Out an Anaesthetic Aesthetic" and "Corpus/Corps/Corpse: Writing the Body in/at War." Generously scattered throughout Marcus's essays are insightful observations on class in recently recovered war novels by Irene Rathbone and Helen Zenna Smith. However, these observations remain suggestive, pointing to the important work that remains to be done on the subject of class, gender, and the Great War.

Angela Woollacott's essay "Sisters and Brothers in Arms: Family, Class, and Gendering in World War I Britain" is one of the few studies that braids gender and class. Woollacott demonstrates that class-based differences in women's prewar experiences of family, work, and the public sphere created important differences in their experiences of the war. Although women of all classes grieved for their brothers who died in the war, middle-class women's greater dependence on their brothers for financial security and access to the public world compounded their loss. Woollacott's valuable study reminds us of what is overlooked when the social categories that structure our investigations elide the differences within those categories.

While Woollacott reminds us of the important ways in which a woman's class, inextricably entangled with her gender, inflected her experience of the war, my emphasis is different. I am interested not only in how class and gender shaped one's experience of the war, but in how the experience of the war reshaped one's understanding of class and gender.

4. For an account of Mansfield's reaction to her brother's death that is more complex and less judgmental than those of O'Connor and Meyers, see C. A. Hankin 105-15.

5. For a similar moment, see Antonia White's "The House of Clouds." The protagonist, who has been incarcerated for insanity, assumes the identities of dead soldiers: "She spoke with his voice. She felt the pain of amputated limbs, of blinded eyes. She coughed up blood from lungs torn to rags by shrapnel. Over and over again, in trenches, in field hospitals, in German camps, she died a lingering death" (605-06). Of course Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway offers a scene with a similar dynamic (although a different mood): Clarissa Dalloway's empathy with Septimus Smith is so complete, she imaginatively inhabits his dying body.

6. See, for example, Fullbrook 117-23, Hankin 235-41, and Hanson and Gurr 115-23.

7. This description of Edwardian society comes from Rae Harris Stoll's study of E. M. Forster's Howards End, but it serves as an equally apt description of the society in "The Garden-Party."

8. Weiss and Taylor emphatically aver that Laurie "understands. He has also been initiated" (364). One of the few critics to explicitly state the contrary is Walker: "Does he really understand what she is talking about? One wonders. One wonders whether he even understands the significance of the death to her ..." (358).

9. Mansfield's method of representing the women's dialect is, of course, a common strategy in literary texts. I am not dismissing Mansfield's--and other writers'--struggles to record the various dialects of characters. Instead, I wish to underline what is striking about this moment in the text: there are other (male) working-class characters in this text who speak, but the only working-class characters whose dialect is represented through orthographic manipulation are these women. The eruption of this jarring dialect into the text is highlighted by its contrast to the language that Laura ascribes to the dead man.

10. This biographical information is contained in Mary Burgan's "Childbirth Trauma in Katherine Mansfield's Early Stories." Another

discussion of Mansfield that focuses on maternity is offered by Susan Gubar in "The Birth of the Artist as Heroine: (Re)production, the Kunstlerroman Tradition, and the Fiction of Katherine Mansfield." Gubar argues that Leslie's death inspired a transformation in Mansfield's attitude toward maternity from fear to celebration as Mansfield links women's procreativity with her own literary creativity; acting as Leslie's "mother," Mansfield is able to "birth" him back to life in her writings (34). Without dismissing the comfort Mansfield experiences in resurrecting Leslie, my reading of the Journal and "The Garden-Party" underscores Mansfield's recognition of the damaging effects on women of their postwar roles.

11. My point about aestheticization coincides with previous criticism. Davis notices in the story the repeated use of the word "picture," which "has become synonymous with 'untrustworthy, unreal, artificial'" (64). The connection he sees between Laura's hat and her passage to womanhood hints at, without making explicit, the crucial link between aestheticization and middle-class women's training in how to perceive themselves (63). Hankin and Fullbrook articulate clearly the connection between the beauty of the Sheridans' world (including Laura's new hat) and the privileges of their class. Laura's decision to not worry about the dead carter as she admires herself in the hat is, Fullbrook aptly observes, "an extraordinary moment of conscience callousing over" (122). Fullbrook further suggests that Mansfield rejects Laura's later appreciation of the dead man's beauty, which "remains in the aesthetic mode of the [middle-class] party" (122). For Hankin, the beauty of the corpse "temper[s]" Laura's "initiation into the harshness of adult life," and "The Garden-Party" offers readers, too, a "reprieve," "assuag[ing] both our guilt about social inequalities and our haunting anxiety about death" (241).

12. See Leed for a similar discussion of the class implications of the Great War, especially within German culture. An important element of the wartime disillusionment of German volunteers from the upper and middle classes was their discovery that war work was, essentially, working-class labor.

Wohl demonstrates that the British myth of the lost generation refers in particular to the men of the elite class. For a detailed statistical analysis of class and military service in the Great War, see Winter.

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Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) Darrohn, Christine. "'Blown to Bits!': Katherine Mansfield's 'The Garden-Party' and the Great War." Short Story Criticism, edited by

Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 81, Gale, 2005. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1420065251/LitRC?u=hunt25841&sid=LitRC&xid=6435006b. Accessed 24 Apr. 2021. Originally published in Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 44, no. 3, Fall 1998, pp. 513-539.

Gale Document Number: GALE|H1420065251