Mansfield uses her story, “The Garden Party,” as a tool to express her feelings about the chasm between social classes.  In her story, she eloquently presents the differences between the upper and lower classes.  The two parties are as drastically different as night and day.

Mansfield starts the story off in the early morning right after breakfast.  It’s a fresh day in the “early summer” and the household is busy planning for a garden party.  The morning is perfect and the characters and setting almost surreal.  Mansfield allows us to experience life as the upper class characters experience it.  It is bright and cheerful, just like the spring day.  The sweets and lilies and servants keep life happy for Laura and her family.  Mansfield’s season choice of early summer puts us in a certain mindset of life beginning, of excitement, and of readiness.  We experience the “daisy plants” and “roses” growing in the garden and the “blue [sky]…veiled with a haze of light gold,” and Mansfield plays on our own memories of new days and summer happiness.  We are pulled into the surrealism of the scene, ready to accept this way of life as standard, nothing less than normal.

As the story progresses, we get to know Laura.  We accept her readiness to help.  She claims to “love having to arrange things” (and in the end we see that she actually may arrange things “better than anyone else” as she believes she can.)   We relate to her love of exotic things.  She can hardly bear covering the exquisite “karakas” that remind her so much of a “desert island.”  We begin to touch on her naivety.  She blushes and flusters when she must actually start to arrange the party things.  But then she falls into step.  She finds that she quite likes the workmen.  She even wonders why couldn’t she “have workmen for her friends rather than the silly boys she danced with?”  Why would she want to trade her friends in for workmen!  She must be very naïve!  She pretends for a while to be a “work girl,” admiring the “chock-chock of wooden hammers” while also admiring the workmen.  But then the phone brings her back from her day dream and she goes back to normalcy. 

Our little world of cream puffs and band music is momentarily shaken.  The house gets news that a man has died!  Laura automatically wants to call off the party.  She doesn’t want to bother the “poor woman” with a band.  Laura is distraught.  A party!  With a man dead!  But then her family reminds her that he was simply a “drunk”—a worker who met his end.  A nice distraction comes in the form of a hat from her mother.  She takes the trinket from her mother and puts on a happier face.  She is now distracted. And then she puts on her hat and goes to the party and forgets the whole business.  The party is over and Laura expresses her happiness at being with “people who are all happy, to press hands, press cheeks, smile into eyes.”

As night falls, Laura remembers the man—the man who lived in the pitiful little “cottages.”  She suggests that she could take the food left over from the garden party to the widow and her children.  As Laura steps into the night she leaves her world and enters another.  One that is scary and horrifying but also “wonderful.”  She encounters “dark people” at the house but doesn’t register anything specific about them.  She sees Mrs. Scott, the widow and leaves her basket of food.  Then she is ends up in the room with the dead man and she realizes that her life is not the only life.  She sees him “sleeping,” “dreaming.”  He is “happy.”  Perhaps Laura realizes that this man lived his life and earned his food and took care of his family.  He worked, he worked himself to death, as Laura has never really done.  She finally sees that life is not parties and hats and pretty, expensive flowers.  It is so much more.  Her ending words—“isn’t life”—express her new knowledge of the world and also her lack of explanation.  She sees more than her existence.  The surreal life she knew crumbles but she isn’t as horrified as her family would guess; she is “[marveled].”

Mansfield uses many elements to present her case.  She enchants the reader with beauty and season and extravagance.  Then she allows the reader to come back to reality, just as Laura comes into reality.  Mansfield probably reaches a much broader audience of Roaring Twenties readers, obsessed with new products of industry and of transportation and of leisure, with this handsome story than she possibly could have if she had simply spoken her troubled feelings or preached her agitation.  Perhaps her readers will pick up on Laura’s big heart as she reacts to a man’s death and offers the band a drink and shares food with those in need.  Perhaps her readers will snap into reality just as Laura did and realize that life isn’t all daisies and roses.  It is something more—something to be shared and cherished and lived.  Hopefully Laura won’t forget this when she goes back to her home, to her family.  She apologized for her silly hat, her extravagant dress, after all, but she was all too willing to go on back with her brother.                               

Personal Critique 

I think I got pretty close to the significance of Mansfield’s story.  I detected the clash between social structures and the “blinders” blocking the family’s world, as Foster did.  But I did, unfortunately miss out on the bird theme.  I noticed the surreal environment, but I didn’t see the importance of the mother as Foster did.  I did notice how important the hat was, how it seemed to transform Laura from distraught to ready to mingle with extreme speed, but I missed the fact that it was from her mother, that it was bringing some of her mother with it.  It seems to have brought some of her mother’s blinding abilities, actually.  I didn’t quite pick up on the going to hell thing.  I kind of like to avoid thinking of something so terrible, I would rather think of her simply “leaving her world and going to another.”  But now I realize I should have seen that it wasn’t simply another world, but hell.  Ouch.  I picked up on the growing up less innocent part of Laurie, but not the destined to go back to her mother and act just the same illustration.  I think I did pretty well with this essay.  I did well on a detail analysis, like I would have done for Language and Composition.  But, I did not do so well on connecting the story to other works of literature, like I will do next year.  So, in other words, I dropped the bomb.  Better brush up on my mythology!