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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 which 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.