By Lucy Verlaque ’25

Major(s): English

Minor(s): Creative writing; Journalism, editing, & publishing; Gender studies

Contributor Biography: Lucy Verlaque is a senior English major with minors in creative writing, journalism, editing, & publishing, and gender studies. In her time at Washington College, Lucy has loved being involved with student-run publications; over the years, she has served as associate and managing editor of Washington College Review, a staff writer and copy editor for The Elm, and prose editor and Editor in Chief of Collegian. She has also worked as an interlibrary loan assistant in Miller Library, a peer writing consultant at the Writing Center, and a poetry screener for Cherry Tree. In her free time, Lucy enjoys drinking coffee, watching silly TV shows with her friends, and obsessing over Jane Austen.

Brief Description: This literary analysis focuses on setting’s role in depicting intersections of class and gender in Katherine Mansfield’s 1922 short story, “The Garden Party.” Mansfield’s descriptions of setting reflect the shifting attitudes of Laura Sheridan, a young girl in charge of hosting a garden party at her family’s upper-class home, as she confronts class distinctions between her and her lower-class neighbors. The story’s intertwined physical and emotional journey can be analogous to women’s experience navigating the distinctions between the private and public sphere in the 1920s.

The following was written for ENG-394-11: Feminist Modernism

If modernist writing can be defined by its dedication to experimental forms and breaking of traditions, Katherine Mansfield’s work clearly exemplifies this category. Mansfield’s 1922 short story, “The Garden Party,” demonstrates her experimentation with literary technique and questioning of conventions. The story centers on a young girl named Laura Sheridan as she takes charge hosting a garden party at her family’s upper-class home, directing workmen and cooks while insisting she rejects the class divide between them. Tensions ensue, however, when she is informed that a man in the nearby working-class neighborhood has been killed. Despite initially expressing a desire to be sensitive to the grieving community next door, Laura is easily persuaded by her family to follow through with their party and have a wonderful time. Only when Laura brings leftover food to the dead man’s widow and physically enters their space does she begin to feel true sympathy and understanding of the working-class people before her. As we follow Laura’s journey navigating distinctions of class, we see Mansfield’s descriptions of physical settings used to reflect Laura’s shifting attitudes toward class. The intertwining of the story’s physical and emotional journey can be analogous to women’s experience navigating the distinctions between the private and public sphere in the 1920s, with the upper-class setting reflecting the private sphere women were confined to and the lower-class setting reflecting the public sphere they needed to break into before they could fully understand it.

The story begins with Laura directing a team of workmen around her family’s garden as they prepare decorations for the party. In this setting, the workmen have been brought into Laura’s privileged sphere to work for her; Laura’s interactions with them occur through a lens of comfort in her familiarity with the social rules of this upper-class space. As she watches one workman pinch and smell a sprig of lavender—an action that fills her with “wonder,” as she’s only known upper class men to “car[e] for things like that”—she realizes “how extraordinarily nice workmen were” and declares she “would get on much better with men like these” than with the “silly” boys within her social sphere (Mansfield 433). Mansfield’s attention to this scene’s physical setting of the garden highlights the irony in Laura’s initial perspective on class. Following the revelation that workmen, too, can enjoy the scent of flowers, Laura muses on the forces that separate them from interacting with each other more often: “It’s all the fault, she decided, as the tall fellow drew something on the back of an envelope, something that was to be looped up or left to hang, of these absurd class distinctions. Well, for her part, she didn’t feel them” (433). As this worker is in the midst of performing a job that Laura’s family is paying him to complete, Laura claims to be unaware of the “absurd class distinctions” between them, emphasizing the dissonance between her environment and her understanding of class. Her following actions continue to demonstrate this irony; in an effort “to prove…how she despised stupid conventions, Laura took a big bite of her bread and butter as she stared at the little drawing. She felt just like a work girl” (433). Laura’s notion of what it means to feel “just like a work girl” still exists within the context of her upper-class setting and is not informed by a genuine understanding of what it would be like to experience their position. 

Laura, privileged with the stability and material luxuries of her upper-class lifestyle, is in a place of financial power over the workmen as they interact within her home setting. Still, her privilege exists within the structure of her family’s expectations, particularly those of her mother and sisters. These expectations reflect the gendered societal norms that aimed to keep women confined to the private sphere of the home and, thus, the status quo. Laura first confronts this maintenance of the status quo when, after hearing of the workman’s death, she insists to her sister and mother that they must cancel the party out of respect to the nearby grieving community. To her bewilderment, her mother is amused by such an idea, responding: “‘But, my dear child, use your common sense. It’s only by accident we’ve heard of it. If someone had died there normally—and I can’t understand how they keep alive in those poky little holes—we should still be having our party, shouldn’t we?’” (436). Her mother does not so much as pause to question the narrative she is impressing upon her daughter—nor give her daughter’s questions any validity—reflecting her indoctrination into the gendered expectations she must fulfill within this sphere and, in turn, pass down to her children. Though Laura harbors lingering feelings of uneasiness upon receiving this response, her mother gives her a hat to wear, and when she sees herself in the mirror wearing it, she thinks, “Never had she imagined she could look like that. Is mother right? she thought. She hoped her mother was right” (436). By blindly following her mother’s encouragement of the status quo, Laura begins to adhere to the rules she knows rather than challenge them. In ceasing her efforts to build sympathy and bridge class divides with her neighbors, she becomes even more enclosed within the private sphere. The tension Laura faces parallels the decision many women of the time would have faced: either to perpetuate the norm by remaining in the domestic sphere or defy conventions by insisting upon their place in the public sphere.

Following this point, the narration fails to reflect Laura’s earlier attempts of empathy toward the people of the lower class; rather, the descriptions of the neighborhood of the man who was killed begin to comply with her mother’s outlook. The houses of the working-class people are suddenly “far too near” to the Sheridans’ house and “the greatest possible eyesore” against the backdrop of their wealthy neighborhood; even the “smoke coming out of their chimneys was poverty stricken. Little rags and shreds of smoke, so unlike the great silvery plumes that uncurled from the Sheridans’ chimneys” (436). The syntax Mansfield employs to illustrate Laura’s physical view of this setting conveys the attitudes Laura is being primed to perpetuate. Laura is set to follow the path laid out before her until, ironically, her mother suggests Laura brings the man’s widow and family leftover treats from their party.

 The setting then shifts to that of the working class neighborhood on the other side of the broad road, and Laura becomes immersed in it for the first time. Though she has briefly walked through this neighborhood before with her brother, bringing the basket of food to the recently widowed woman is the first time she has had to directly interact with the space and the people who live there. She immediately feels out of place due to the way she is dressed compared to the neighborhood’s residents: “How her frock shone…Were the people looking at her? They must be. It was a mistake to have come” (438). Suddenly, she has entered a sphere in which she is an outsider. While the workmen who entered her sphere earlier likely had some level of familiarity with their external sphere from experience working for upper-class individuals, Laura has no firsthand knowledge of the space she is entering. Despite her discomfort and hesitation to interact with the widow, she is forced to confront the reality of the class distinctions between them—a recognition that culminates in the moment she sees the body of the man who died that morning: “What did garden parties and baskets and lace frocks matter to him?” (439). In this moment, Laura transcends class barriers in a way that had been inaccessible to her from her previous setting. The limited language of the narration—which focuses on material objects and familiar ideas—mirrors her inability to properly express this revelation, which in turn reflects the extent of her previous confinement. 

Laura returns home sobbing and is comforted by her older brother, Laurie. Having returned to her sphere with a new perspective, she attempts to convey her newfound ideas but fails: “‘Isn’t life,’ she stammered, ‘isn’t life—’ But what life was she couldn’t explain. No matter. He quite understood” (439). Laurie’s seamless understanding of Laura’s emotions, even when she cannot make sense of them herself, is indicative of his familiarity with the concepts she is still processing. He is familiar with both spheres—much like how men had access to both the private and public spheres where women did not—and is able to guide her as she discovers complexities previously unknown to her. In this sense, she has broken out of the sphere she had been confined to and into one that introduces a brand-new way of thinking, a journey that mirrors that of women in the 1920s. 

Works Cited: Mansfield, Katherine. “The Garden Party.” The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Volume 6: The Twentieth Century and Beyond, Broadview Press, 2008.