THE GARDEN PARTY
by Katherine Mansfield, 1922

Katherine Mansfield published The Garden Party and Other Stories in 1922, the same year as T. S. Eliot's Waste Land and James Joyce's Ulysses. Mansfield's collection similarly represents the mature progress of her literary gift. It contains some of her finest work and illustrates the artistic usefulness of her New Zealand background. The title story, "The Garden Party," tells of a lavish occasion. The marquee has been erected, the flowers arranged, the women of the household dressed, and the guests are about to arrive when the news is brought: a young man, a carter who lived in the poor cottages in the road below the house, has been killed in an accident. The sensitive Laura wishes to abandon the party, but practicality prevails. The grieving household is ignored until the party is over, when Laura, still in party attire, is sent with a basket of sandwiches and cream cakes to comfort the grieving family. Anthony Apiers, the eminent Mansfield biographer, once asked Mansfield's sister Vera about the veracity of the tale. Had there been a garden party, and was there an accident? She is said to have replied, "Indeed there was…. And I was the one who went down with the things." Such is the tenuous relation between fact and fiction.

The fictional version, however, demonstrates the immediacy with which Mansfield absorbs the reader into her stories. The story begins, "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 narrator piles on detail, acutely observed: gardeners are mowing and sweeping, there are dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been, and the green bushes are bowed with roses. Laura's voice is heard rather than described, and her character is swiftly depicted in a brief interchange with her mother and sister. Laura is young but old enough to feel gauche. The workmen look impressive, and she "wished now that she was not holding that piece of bread and butter…. She blushed and tried to look severe and even a little bit short sighted as she came up to them." Laura, the artistic one, was to supervise the placement of the marquee.

Mansfield, no less than James Joyce, demonstrates a preoccupation with the growth of an artistic sensibility. Laura must negotiate the difficult terrain between the values inculcated by her upper-middle-class upbringing and those of a working class which lie largely outside of her experience. She must do so in a sparsely populated New Zealand where utility and practicality are, of necessity, revered. Thus it is the workmen who dictate the placement of the marquee: "Against the karakas…. And they were so lovely, with their broad, gleaming leaves, and their clusters of yellow fruit…. Must they be hidden by a marquee? They must." Nevertheless, Laura experiments with the working-class role. Class distinctions are absurd to her. She prefers the broad-shouldered workmen who care for the smell of lavender to the silly boys who come to Sunday night supper. To show how much she despises stupid conversation, Laura takes a big bite of bread and butter: "She felt just like a working girl."

The adolescent oscillation of Laura's emotions allows the development of a tightly controlled tension in "The Garden Party." Beneath Laura's sadness and genuine emotion lies the grotesquely humorous incongruity that must attend the death of a man who has had the bad taste to get himself killed on the day of a garden party. Godber's man tells his tale with relish, and Laura's extravagant wish to stop the party is beyond comprehension. After all, warns sister Jose, "If you're going to stop a band playing every time some one has an accident, you'll lead a very strenuous life." Laura is equally astonished by her mother's behavior. On being told that a man has been killed, her mother says, "Not in the garden?" Mansfield's humor at such times is Wildean; her characters demonstrate a similar incapacity to distinguish between the relative importance of deaths and cups of tea. Only Laura wonders if the grieving widow will like a basket of sandwiches and cream puffs.

It is, then, to Laura that the glimpse of transcendence is given. Urged to view the dead body of the young man, Laura discovers him remote and peaceful, 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…. All is well, said that sleeping face. This is just as it should be. I am content." The unique moment passes, and Laura returns to character. On such occasions one is expected to cry, or to say something: "Forgive my hat," she says.

Later, only Laura's brother understands. Mansfield's own brother, of course, died on 7 October 1915 as the result of a hand grenade accident in World War I. In January 1916 she wrote in her journal: "Now—now I want to write recollections of my own country. Yes I want to write about my own country until I simply exhaust my store…. My brother & I were born there … in my thoughts I range with him over all the remembered places."

—Jan Pilditch